User:Bugcruncher/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Abiotic stress

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the article because it relates to what I have been studying at the College of Idaho and the article was C-Class. Ecology is broadly what I'm interested in, and abiotic stress is something I know about and I feel it is often under discussed. I was wanting to see if they had very much material. At a glance, the article seems a bit lacking.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead: I feel that the lead is pretty good. Some of the sentences aren't as good as they could be and use vague terms like "it" to refer to a previous subject or was sort of vague language in general. For the most part though the page has a good initial sentence as well as detailing the sections that are later in the article. I was able to understand what the entire page was in a nutshell using only the first sentence which was one of the criteria above. I would say that maybe the lead is underdetailed however. The lead also seemed to focus a little too much on biotic factors. I understand that clarifying abiotic vs. biotic is important, but I feel that the page titled "abiotic stress" should focus more on abiotic factors.

Content: I think that the content for the plant section is very thorough, but for the animal factors it is fairly lacking. I understand that abiotic stress is much more impactful on plants, but the section about animals focuses on heat. I think that something like wet bulb temperature would be useful as well. It isn't just heat that affects animals, but a combination of heat and moisture can be lethal to animals that can regulate their internal body temperature(ie. humans when sweating). The other one that stuck out to me was mentioning how fire could be a beneficial abiotic force, but then not going into as much detail as to how fire can be a detrimental force as well. For most of the stressors like heat or water, there are flipsides to either too much or too little of them.

Tone and Balance: My only issue with the article in terms of tone was again in the animals section. The subsection opens with: "For animals, the most stressful of all the abiotic stressors is heat." While I agree that heat can be one of the more catastrophic abiotic stressors, I feel that it is this sort of phrase that broadly compares heat to all other stressors. I would assume that the main contributor NCBioteacher has more of a background in plants, this shows in their intense coverage regarding plants then the lacking sections about animals.

Sources and References: The references and citations all seem pretty good. I tried five or six links and they all worked. Something that I realized that could be a problem with linking journals and academic sourcing I have access to is it could be behind a paywall if others outside of C of I try to access the content. Fortunately, all of the links were functional and accessible. The citations were pretty extensive. My only issue potentially is that some of the sources are ten or more years old. I feel that in this case that is less important, considering that the research on abiotic stressors regarding plants (for example) likely hasn't changed.

Organization and Writing Quality: I feel that the organization works well with the exception of the "benefits" and "detriments" sections. I feel a cleaner layout would be to put them in their respective subsections like plants and animals. Rather than having a benefits section of abiotic stress on plants, just put a benefits and detriments section within the plants and animals section. As for writing quality, I feel that some of the sentences can be short and choppy without really adding anything to the article. An example is "Abiotic stress is essentially unavoidable". This sentence seemed out of place and/or could have been worked into the lead without getting its own out of place sentence.

Images and Media: There is only one image on the page. The image adheres to copyright rules on wikipedia and is relevant to the content of the page. However, there are probably many diagrams and graphics out there that could add a good visual to some of the facts presented. In my mind, I think adding a picture and/or more content detailing how fire can be beneficial would be helpful. I think of young kids or maybe people who don't know very much about ecology maybe being confused how fire could be beneficial and I think this could be helpful.

Talk and discussion: There is essentially no discussion regarding the content. There are a couple questions posed, but no one is really communicating. From what I gather based on the edits, people were just adding or removing things without much interaction besides the editing comments. I think that maybe talking about potential roadmaps or some sort of outline about the page is needed or could be helpful.

Overall Impressions:

The sections about plants are all phenomenal. However they almost seem "too good" relative to the rest of the page. The rest of the page is somewhat lacking, but I can somewhat understand why. The first section explicitly details how plants are more affected by abiotic stress so it would make sense why the page would have an emphasis on plants. That being said, there are examples of abiotic factors creating stress for animals that would be able to be added to round the page out more.