User:CalmPeach/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Ecology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate because I have taken Ecology and Evolution, so I know quite a bit from that class. I also thought it could relate to microbiology because we are learning about microbes and how they work, which we all know that microbes are everywhere and they affect all our lives. I do think that this article can help us all understand how ecology works, and it should be something that we all learn about. Just looking through this article, I can tell that it has a lot of good information, so it will be perfect for an evaluation.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section does include an introductory sentence to talk about what Ecology is and how it can pertain to every day life. However, the section doesn't have an area to talk about the sections it has, but it does say what Ecology can be related to. From what I can tell, there isn't any information in the introduction that isn't in the rest of the article, but there is way too much information in the lead. The lead is a little overwhelming with how much information there is since there are too many links that make me lose my focus.

Content

The content is relavent to the topic, and there is a lot of good information for the reader to learn. The first section has the most information and it contains a lot of the basic information needed for learning about this subject. A lot of information in the article is from the 1950s to the early 2000s, so there is a lot of outdated information but there is a lot of relavent information from the last few years. I know that there is a few things that haven't changed from these times, but there is quite a lot of older information. Most of the information in this article I learned in classs, so I feel that most of it is still relvent to stay in the article. I don't think any information is missing, and if I could add anything in this article it would be more on ecological interactions like mutalism. This article doesn't address any underrepresented history.

Tone and Balance

I would say that this article kept a neutral tone throughout the whole article, and I wouldn't change anything with the tone.

Sources and References

All the facts are backed up since most things are cited, the links to the citations work, and they are fairly current besides the articles from the 1950s-1990s.

Organization and Writing Quality

The writing throughout this article is great, but I would fix a few sentences in the introduction due to grammar that doesn't work. I don't like how it's sectioned since the first section has such a wide range that should be broke into smaller sections. There are 14 parts under the first sections, and there are sections that could be broken into their own section like food chains and trophic levels.

Images and Media

There are a good amount of images throughout the article, but there could be more for a couple of different subjects like for human ecology. They are all well-captioned, but they aren't laid out in an appealing way.

Talk Page Discussion

This article is constantly being edited and there is so much work that everyone has put into it considering people are continuously editing sources as well as adding new infomation. This article is rated a GA level, and is a part of several projects such as the ecology, biology, extinction, ecoreigions, enviroment, evolutionary biology, history of science, and vital projects. Wikipedia's conversations aren't very different from the conversations we've had in class since they put this as a project with high priority, however, no one has used the talk page in quite a while.

Overall Impression

Articles overall status is good because it has the strength of the information in the article being very important. I wouldn't add anything in particular that could change this article significantly, but I would edit it to improve what's already there. Since I believe this article is well-developed, I would only change grammer, organization of photos/sections, and fix a few sentences that don't make sense.

CalmPeach (talk) 21:57, 29 January 2022 (UTC)