User:CourteneyD1999/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Mating call

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.)

Mating calls are unique in animal behaviour as they occur across many different species, but not required by all. There is also a fair amount of research into the mating calls if various species.

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.)

The first sentence of the lead section gives a clear, concise definition of a mating call. The main paragraph is a short description of what to expect in the whole article. Overall, the lead is consice and informative without mentioning anything not mentioned in the article.

The articles contains 3 main subtopics. The first 2, vocalization and mechanical calls, are both relevant to mating calls as they are 2 distinct categories of mating calls and are thus distinctly defined. The third topic deals with speciation as a result of mating calls, which is a related and relevant topic concerened with mating calls. Topics are up-to-date, but some of the resources for examples of animals and different mating calls were from the 1970's and 1980's, with one from 1915. The topics are given the appropriate consideration and coverage in the article.

The article is written in a neutral tone and presents its contents as fact. Although the article does not seem biased towards the opinion of a certain group, I believe the article could use more details on the psychology behind mating calls.

Facts are supported by secondary sources from peer-reviewed journals with working and relevent links, but not all links are very current.

The 3 subcategories are relevant and the subcategories are broken down into relevent animal types. I did not see any spelling or grammatical errors.

There are several images of various types of animals displaying mating calls by varying mechanisms and help to illustrate the call mechanisms to the reader. Some images are well captioned and contained links to relevant pages (such as the rut page under the image of the red deer stag), but others could use some more description about what the animals are specifically doing, not just the name of the animal (such as with the images of frogs). The images are laid out along the right hand side of the article as to not break the article up in a weird way and keep the relevant images close to the relevant topic.

The talk page consists of beneficial recommendations to strengthen the article, as well as supporting links/evidence to contribute to the article. This article has a C-Class rating and is part of the following WikiProjects: WikiProject Evolutionary Biology (Low-importance); WikiProject Biology (Low-importance); and WikiProject Biology (Mid-importance). This article discusses the physiology behind mating calls similar to how we would discuss the subject in class. The article does not discuss the psychological perspectives behind evaluating the psychology behind mating calls as we would in class.

Overall, the article is factual, short, concise, and informative. Strengths of the article would include its conciseness, the physiological and morphological details behind mating calls, and the relevant examples given. The shortness of the article could be considered a weakness. I would suggest considering the psychology and social sciences behind mating calls. I would also suggest adding more links such as linking vocalizations and mechanical calls in the lead section to their places in the article and linking the mention of bird song under vocalizations to the article on bird vocalizations.