User:Avkara/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
RNA World

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate as we recently covered related areas in our course. In addition, both of my PhD advisors have direct connections to this theory as Thomas Cech is my academic great-grandfather and Jack Szostak is my academic grandfather.

Lead section
The lead includes an introductory sentence that directly describes the RNA world hypothesis. The lead section goes on to include a brief history and some components to the overall theory. Additional discussion of key properties of RNA that support this theory could be useful to include in a lead section. For example, the key enzymatic and storage properties of RNA like self-replication, catalysis, ligation, and peptide-bond formation should be mentioned in the lead section. Additional discussion of other theories could be shortened or briefly mentioned.

Content
The majority of the content is directly relevant to the RNA world hypothesis. The section on origin of sexual reproduction from RNA could be a separate Wikipedia article, as this article should focus on the initial connection between RNA and abiogenesis. An alternative is changing the section heading to "Origin of Autocatalysis" to dispel confusion between eukaryotic sexual reproduction and autocatalysis. There are a couple other section headings that could benefit from clarification. For example, changing "Evolution of DNA" to "Evolution of DNA from RNA" could help better connect the sections and better relay topics to the audience. Overall, the content is mostly up-to-date but it seems there are no references from peer-reviewed articles after 2020. Updating the article to include recent research from new research in the area could be useful. This article does not address Wikipedia's equity gaps.

Tone and Balance
The tone of the article is fairly neutral. Additional brief discussion of the connection between RNA structure and function beyond comparing DNA and RNA could be useful to support the theory. There are also an increasing number of proposed RNA-peptide world theories, which would be useful to discuss in this article as well. There does not seem to be any clear claims or viewpoints that are overrepresented or biased towards a specific position. The authors seem to clear discuss the content and most potential perspectives of the content.