User:EasyBlakeOven/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Guppy

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
My preliminary impression of the mating and reproduction sections of the article was that there would be a great deal of information covered, and that there is much to learn about the reproductive process and behavior of guppies.

Evaluate the article
As a whole the article's mating and reproduction sections are to the point and informative, but lack a bit in clarification. I will begin with the positive qualities of the article and then cover what I believe were its downfalls and suggest potential improvements. First of all, not considering grammatical details that impact the text's clarity, I would say that the information covered in these two sections is well researched and interesting. I found that there was a sufficient number of citations included in both sections, and in the mating section especially. These links appear to be mostly peer reviewed journals, and there is nothing to suggest that the information is taken from untrustworthy sources. The inclusion of numerous links allows for easy rerouting to more detailed and specific information if needed by the reader. The amount of pictures and video links in the sections were minimal (although I do not find it to a bad thing necessarily) but effectively give representations of the content covered in text and help reinforce understanding with visual examples.

As for the details I feel could be improved on, the most significant is the organization of the sections. Having the mating sub-section first in the ecology and behavior category is not a problem, but it is definitely a bit odd that reproduction is not directly alongside mating, or even in the same section as it considering that reproduction would go well in the behavior section. On top of this I believe that there are portions of the mating section that would make a lot more sense if I had already read the reproduction section. An example of this is the discussion of inbreeding in which the article explains why it should be avoided and uses inbreeding depression as a consequence, only to give a link to further in the article. I believe that having the reproduction section just prior to the mating section would allow for an overall better flow of information, and would avoid repeating summarizations of information which I also believe should be lessened in these sections.

Another thing that could be improved on would be a more in depth explanation of the topics that are mentioned in the article. This seemed to be more evident in the mating section especially in the paragraph that introduces the subject of mechanisms that assist in the avoidance of inbreeding prior to copulation, but does not list them and goes on to explain post-copulatory mechanisms instead. I feel that the inclusion of more information here would allow for a better understanding of such mechanisms, and including more information in general would not hurt.