User:Baum019/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Last Glacial Maximum

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I have looked at it in the past while creating presentations for classes. The LGM is very relevant for my field of research, so I would know if the content listed was true or not. This page is a level-5 vital article, which I would assume means it is important? So the information should be reliable while reading it. I liked the page upon first review of it. There are some grammar things that I wasn't a fan of, but I think what I would use is more scientific writing. I need to get out of that mindset for these articles.

Evaluate the article
Lead: The lead section of this article was well thought out. Each section of the article is briefly discussed in this part, and it gives a good understanding of what you are reading. I don't think that the lead was overly detailed at all. You can read the lead and not have to read the rest of the paper unless you wanted more in depth answers on the LGM.

Content: In reading the content, it is all relevant to the topic. To my knowledge the content was up to date, and many of the sources are from the last 20 years which would be relevant. This article doesn't address anything about the equity gap.

Tone and Balance: The article doesn't have any sections that are trying to persuade the reader. There are not many things that could be argued for the LGM, it is more based in fact and not a philosophical idea.

Sources and References: I did notice that in the "Glacial climate" section there is a lack of sources. Several paragraphs don't have sources listed in them. Other places in the article felt like they had enough sources listed. There are 81 sources total, and the ones that I looked at definitely cover the topic. Some of the sources did go back to the mid 90's, which can be a little outdated now for scientific literature. However, some groundbreaking papers were from that time, and are still considered great papers. There is a diverse set of authors for the papers, however I noticed specifically the link to source 15 wouldn't work. I didn't check too many of them, but the others I looked at seemed to be working.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is concise and well written. There are some parts that seem to be a little more scientific style writing instead of neutral concise writing. I didn't notice any grammatical errors. The sections of the article were well thought out and covered the main topics of the LGM.

Images and Media: There are several images on this page. Most of them are quite small which I didn't like very much. In checking some, they all came from Wikimedia, which is adhering to the copyright restrictions. The images are well captioned, but I think they could be more visually appealing. They all fall on the right side near the top of each section, which makes the article seem repetitive.

Talk Page: Some of the discussions went all the way back to 2006, which shocked me. I was 5 years old when that was talked about. There are more recent ones, some from the end of last year. It looks like they took out a section of the article because it was too unspecific. There was a plot that had temperature without units and other confusing units that weren't described in the caption, so it was deleted. Some discussions were interesting to read because it was scientists answering questions about the article that might have been confusing. The article is level-5 vital and rated C-class. It is also of interest to 5 WikiProjects: Glaciers, Environment, Climate change, Geography, and Geology. I think the Wikipedia article is similar to how I have discussed it in class. When talking about the LGM in class, we tend to go more in depth because we understand more about proxies and how to get the information they discuss. We talk about the ice cores that show the LGM or glacial moraines that showcase the timing of the LGM. Overall, the wiki page is a good overview of the LGM, but there is much more to it.

Overall Impressions: I think this article was well written and thought out. Some strengths is how many sources it has listed. Some Wikipedia articles are relatively short, but this one had some length to it. It appears to have been edited over some time, since the talk page goes back to 2006. That means that this page has evolved over time, and is constantly being updated because of how relevant it is. I think that maybe adding a section about life on Earth at that time would be a good improvement. Not many people know that humans were even around during the LGM, so it would be a good contribution to discuss how many animals were living around this time. The average reader might think things were so ice and snow covered that life didn't exist, which isn't the case. I would say that the paper is well-developed, but not perfect by any means. There is always something to add or change.