User:Dtkraft/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
UY Scuti

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 article because I am somewhat interested in Astronomy and I was surprised that the article for UY Scuti, which from what I know is one of the largest known stars in the visible universe, was rated a C-class article. Since it is one of the largest stars in the visible universe I thought it would be important to have more information on it because it can give insight into the life cycle of stars and how our Sun will change as it grows older. my first impression was that it was a pretty short article.

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 lead section's first sentence clearly describes the article's topic, but the lead section does not briefly go over all the major topics of the article. The article has a nomenclature and history section, which isn't gone over at all in the lead section. The lead section mostly contains information about the characteristics of the star and then goes more in depth in the characteristics section and the lead section doesn't contain any information that isn't mentioned later in the article. I would say the lead section is concise and not too detailed considering that it isn't a very long article. However, I would say that the lead section is written very well, it seems somewhat choppy and unorganized when compared to the featured article for Betelgeuse, which I will be using for comparison because it is similar to UY Scuti in the sense that it's also one the larger stars in the universe that we know of.

The content of the article is relevant to the topic but there is content that is believe is missing from the article. The article has a nomenclature and history section, which I think should be separated. It's hard for me to tell if the article is up to date or not, it contains a lot of old sources from the 1900's but you could say the same thing about the Betelgeuse article. What I can say though is that the article isn't edited very often; it's a C-class article that is edited less the featured article for Betelgeuse. Generally featured articles have very few things that could be improved, but Betelgeuse is still edited more than UY Scuti. There is probably a lot more content that could be added to the article for UY Scuti if you compare it to the Betelgeuse article. The Betelgeuse article has a lot more information and nearly 10 times more sources than that of UY Scuti. Since the article is talking about a star, there won't be any information related to underrepresented populations.

When it comes to talking about stars and the universe I don't think there is any way to be biased towards a particular position, you can only list facts about the topic, nonetheless, I think the article does have a neutral point of view and doesn't push the reader to believe in one position instead of another.

The article doesn't include references to sources in the lead section, but it seems that's pretty common, even among featured articles. The article does include sources that are relatively new from 2000-2021, but also includes several sources from the late 1900's with the oldest one being from 1927. These sources could be considered old but it seems to be a similar case for the Betelgeuse article, which includes plenty of sources the 1900's and even some from the 1700s and 1800s. All the facts in the article are backed by reliable sources, which when clicked most of them lead to Harvard's astrophysics database.

As I said before some parts of the article are not very well written and feel a little choppy when compared to the Betelgeuse article. Also, the Nomenclature and history section should separated. The last paragraph of the Nomenclature and history section would be better suited in the characteristics section of the article.The article is somewhat difficult to read mostly because it contains a lot of terms that only people who have studied the subject would know of, but from what I can see it doesn't contain any grammatical errors.

The article does include images that are spread out in the article in an appealing way and illustrate how large/bright UY Scuti. the images also have descriptive captions to explain to the reader what they are looking at. I'm not sure if the pictures follow Wikipedia's copyright regulations, but I haven't seen anything on the talk page about violations to copyright regulations or requests to delete images due to copyright violations.

The article is a part of WikiProject Astronomy with a C-lass rating and mid importance rating. The talk page only includes conversations on whether or not certain information is factual or not and talks about how to improve the article. We don't talk about astronomy in class but, when we talk about natural disasters we pretty much never talk about whether or not certain information is factual because it's all coming from the reliable sources such as the professor, TA's, and the book.

Overall, I think the article definitely deserves the C-class rating. The article has some writing and organization issues and it also lacks a lot of information. To reach the level of the Betelgeuse article it would need far more sources of information that will then need to be organized effectively and written in way that is fluid and more understandable to the average person. I think the article does a good job of staying on topic and picking images and writing good captions that are relevant. The article has good base that can be build upon but need a lot more information and sources to do so.