User:GardenerOfMen/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Environmental geology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because its topic joins two fields I am interested in (environmental science and geology). There is some significant overlap between these two fields and I believe it would be beneficial to make it clearer to the scientific community. Right off the bat, the article was not what I expected, and I thought it needed a lot of improvement since it did not do an efficient job at making the importance of this relationship clear.

Evaluate the article
The writing quality is very inconsistent, and some passages are quite tedious to read since they are divided into huge blocks of text with little to no organization. I could spot a handful of grammatical mistakes, as well as many run-on sentences. This article is not concise: some sentences are unnecessarily long and hard to follow as they contain a lot of fluff. Regardless, it still maintains a neutral tone as it is mainly presenting scientific facts and cause-effect relations.

While most references used are up to date, a lot of statements and claims seem unfounded. They might be accurate, however they are not backed by any secondary source. I would suggest citations wherever possible especially when talking about environmental hazards such as groundwater pollution in the hydrogeology section, or land degradation in the soil science section. Additionally, a lot of the works cited are books, which are in fact reliable sources, but they are not very accessible for a general audience, an issue that can be fixed by also including open-access peer reviewed literature. Additional technical terms should be hyperlinked to other Wikipedia articles as well. This article also talks about several ways in which geological knowledge has contributed to mitigating these problems, but it mentions absolutely no real world examples. Adding those would greatly enhance reader experience and perhaps spike curiosity about potential results and how applications differ based on regional setting.

The lack of images and other relevant media makes this article unappealing to read in the first place. It contains only one image (a map) that further promotes a reader's understanding of the content. This article would benefit from more visuals that support and exemplify each individual section.

The talk page discussion is almost empty, with only 3 discussion threads, and it seems to have been inactive for a long time until a couple of years ago. One of the users mention that this article lacks in-depth explanations about the Earth's dynamic nature, and I fully agree. It needs to highlight processes such as the effects of global warming, eustatic sea level change, weathering and erosion, etc. While the article gets edited periodically throughout the years, the changes are minimal and mostly technical (fixing broken links). Focus needs to be shifted on adding more relevant content.

In both the Geology and Environment WikiProjects, this article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale, and Mid-Importance on the importance scale.

Overall, the article is very brief and mostly offers surface level information. Concepts are not developed and correlated adequately, therefore readers may fail to grasp their significance and how they tie in with each other. It almost reads like a list, with a large majority of the information being presented as bullet points.