User:CHill54321/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Darwin's finches

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this topic because we just covered this concept in biology class a few chapters ago. It is important because it explains how adaptive radiation works through the analyzation of finches and their evolutions. This is used as a widely accepted theory that is taught in many classrooms. My first impression is that is is a very detailed, specific article that contains facts and reasoning to Darwin's findings.

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 section: The lead section has a good introductory sentence to set the topic of the article. It provides good details that give the knowledge one would need to continue reading the article. While it contains good detail to "set the scene" of the article, it however does not give a brief overview of what is going to be the contents of the article. It never mentions Darwin's theory, only how Darwin was studying the birds. This would be important to add because Darwin's theory is a large piece of the content in this article.

Content: The content of this article all relates to the topic: Darwin's Finches. This content is concurrent with what we learned in class, and is up to date. The content does not underrepresent any groups, it is just stating the facts about Darwin's studies on finches. One piece of the content that I think is underdeveloped is the Modern research section. If it is valuable enough to mention, in the article, then it is valuable enough information to spend time building an explanation paragraph, instead of the once sentence in the article now.

Tone and Balance: I think that this article is neutral because it is not arguing and opinionated topics. It is stating facts about the topic that are non biased, and purely factual. I do not think that this article is persuasive because it is just speaking on the educational aspects which include Darwin's theory, Facts about the finches he studied, and modern research associated.

Sources and reference: There are many sources that were used to create this article. The sources are a wide variety including manuscripts from Charles Darwin himself, collegiate articles, and science books published on these topics (bird encyclopedia). Not all of the sources are current because the topic covered is something that took place a long time ago. So the manuscripts from Charles Darwin will not be "up to date" but they are most definitely accurate and applicable to this article. The links in the sources do work, meaning that they are not unavailable to fact check. One interesting thing about this article is that some of the sources come from other Wikipedia articles, while that does not make that information not creditable, it is not a great source compared to the other strong primary and secondary resources that were used.

Organization and Writing Quality: I think that is article is clear and concise. While it is a science article and therefore contains names that are hard to read and pronounce, besides these, the article reads fairly easily. I also think that the article has a good flow of information; it goes from explaining Darwin's work into explaining the different characteristics and species of the finches that he studied, and finishing with further research on this topic.

Images and Media: There are three images in this article. These are useful images because they help to illustrate the ideas being discussed in the article and they show a visual representation of the animals that are being discussed. The images have very detailed captions that explain what the images are showing. All three images follow the Wikipedia copyright guidelines.

Talk Page discussion: There are a lot of conversations about specific portions of the article. One example is there was a discussion about simplifying a portion of the article that was too in dept originally, and began to not fit into the topic any more. Two editors worked together to modify and simplify this information so that it fits the article better. The article is a level 5 vital article and has been rated a C-class by the WikiProject Vital Articles. Although we only touched on this topic in class to learn about adaptive radiation, this article goes much farther in depth and reached more of the topic area. Instead of just analyzing Darwin's findings, it explains his research and the bird's taxonomy and characteristics.

Overall impressions: I think that the article has strengths of having very detailed, strong information. It also uses primary sources, making it more credible. Another strength is the depth of the information covered, while it is concise, it still is able to be very educational about this topic. It is a well rounded article that explains Darwin's work and the birds that he studied. One improvement that can be made is a better summary of the whole article in the lead section. If it was treated more like an introduction to the information, including mentioning the topics of the article, that would complete the article.