User:Finkbr/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Challenger Deep

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the Challenger Deep article because it was suggested as part of a WikiProject, and it is also extremely relevant to our class content.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section contains a direct, concise, and useful opening sentence. It includes a brief description of the topography, descents, and history of Challenger Deep, but misses a few key guiding sentences about bathymetry and surveys, as well as lifeforms. The lead is concise and contains important details, but mainly about descents and its history. I would've liked to see a bit more information that the rest of the article holds, but the general gist of the lead was good.

Content

The content portion of this article is incredibly efficient. It carries useful information, those that are heavily supported and some that have yet to be deeply researched, like lifeforms. I'm not surprised that this is the way the article looks, seeing as deep sea exploration (especially at Challenger Deep) is rare and valuable, so only certain pieces of information can be used and are credible. Thus, nearly every source here is useful. Also, the sources are current. Though some historical citations date back to the 1950's, other sources have links to papers published in 2022.

Tone and Balance

The tone of this article is very factual, as it should be. The only content that could be taken as subjective is reports from in the Descent section, but those are not opinionated as is -- it just contains adjectives like "brief" or "quick" to describe some trips to Challenger Deep that could call for more detail.

Sources

As mentioned above, every source here is valuable - and there's a lot of them. All information, even coordinate locations for some mechanical equipment, is cited when necessary. Papers are up to date if need be, and some are from less than a year ago. The only non-cited portions of this article are captions of photos. Some don't have direct links to their page, but they are credited to the photographer when the photo is expanded. All of the links I clicked on function properly, linking either to their paper or loops to another Wikipedia page for reference.

Organization and Writing Quality

This article is written scientifically. There are pieces of the Descent section that read like the methods part of a scientific paper. As mentioned, some pieces of this article go as deep as to mention the coordinates of their collection materials. Dates are used to prove the most accurate results of a study, and the language is not persuasive. One of the only suggestive sentences I found said "Many marine biologists are now skeptical of this supposed sighting." 'Many' is subjective, and we don't know how many marine biologists actually believe this.

Images

As stated, all images are captioned and placed correctly, but a few photographs are not linked with a citation. Other non-photograph infographics are captioned and cited correctly, linking to an appropriate reference.

Talk Page Discussion

People are discussing starting a new category for "Landforms." It's neat to see direct conversation on this topic, as the page makes it seem like the information there is all we have. It seems as if the landforms section may have used to be present on the page, but have since moved to the talk section to be ironed out. Wikipedia discusses this topic in a similar manner to what we've talked about in class, except with some scientific information that is less pertinent to our class, like direct methods of each Descent. Also, the talk page sounds like discussions we'd have in class. 'It's not actually x meters deep" "Yes it is" "Actually it's never been studied in meters, so it has to be a feet calculation" though not directly what was talked about, describe a little bit of what the talk section looks like on this page. This is indeed part of a WikiProject, and that's how I found the article to begin with.

Overall Impressions

Overall, I'm quite impressed by the extent of this page. For as little as we know about the deep sea, there is a plethora of descriptive, accurate, cited content about Challenger Deep. Though this doesn't lead me in a new direction with much novel information, having background is helpful and could be more useful to marine biologists who need a quick lookup while continuing other research on Challenger Deep.