User:Fiodora/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bushtit

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 American bushtit because I genuinely am interested by the animal. The species is very small, even more, it is one of the smallest birds in North America. After some research, I realized that the wikipedia page about American Bushtit can have more information than it already is. I believe the article has not explain many aspects, for instance about their behavior in cold days.

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.)

Lead Section: I believe this article has a good lead section because the introduction sentence introduce American bushtit well which is what this article's main topic. It also briefly mention its habitat and taxonomy, and none of the information is not in the article. Moreover, it's not too short or too detailed.

Content: All of the contents are relevant since it is talking about American bushtit; there's no content that is out of topic and shouldn't be in the article. Most of the sources were updated in the last 10 years, so I believe the content is up-to-date since it is based from the sources. Furthermore, none of the contents discuss about any of the Wikipedia's equity gap and does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations.

Tone and Balance: I believe the article is written formally so the tone is neutral. There is also no strong opinion here, in fact, it only provide facts, hence, there is no claim that appear heavily biased toward a particular position, viewpoint that is overrepresented or underrepresented, and fringe viewpoints. Additionally, this article does not persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another.

Sources and References: This article is backed up by reliable secondary source of information which reflect the available literature about American bushtit. Moreover, after looking more in depth to the authors of the sources, I realized have different ethnicity and social backgrounds which makes them diverse. I believe the downside of this article is that not every fact has a source cited in the article. For example, there is no source that support the fact the species' eye color. I found one scholarly journal that I think can be use to support the facts that are already in this article, and can add more information to this article. https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v099n03/p0424-p0430.pdf.

Organization and writing quality: I absolutely think this article is well-written; it uses familiar words and simple structured sentences which makes it easy to read and understand. Although, it has a few grammatical errors, I believe the mistakes does not change the meaning of the sentence. Moreover, it is divided into sections for each topic which makes it easier for readers; they don't have to read the whole article if they are only looking for an information in a specific area.

Images and Media: This article shows picture so readers can illustrate on what this article is saying; the picture of the bird and its nest. Moreover, I believe they chose the good and clear pictures which makes the article as a whole visually appealing. The caption of the article is also well-explained. Furthermore, the writers give credits to where they got the pictures from, they cited the links there, so I do not see any issue about copyright.

Talk page discussion: There is only one conversation in the talk page of this article. It talks about the name of the species, someone says that "American Bushtit" is not the current official common name of Psaltriparus minimus according to the most recent AOU Checklist. Moreover, the talk page shows that this article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale and low-importance on the project's importance scale. It also shows that currently I am the only one who use it for a WikiProjects. In addition, I realize that Wikipedia talks more about research results, such as taxonomy, but in class, we talk more about the aspects that we can see, such as behavior and characteristics.

Overall impressions: Overall, I believe this is a potentially good article, it just need some improvement and add more information. The great thing about this article is that it does not shows any strong opinions from the writers and the wordings are clear. I think to improve it, I am able to write information about American bushtit from other reliable sources and also find sources that prove the information that are already in the article. Nevertheless, in my opinion, I think this article can be considered as developed enough but not good enough

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