User:Gwgen03/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate Freshwater Acidification Article
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Freshwater acidification
 * The course is called Aquatic Ecology, so I decided to select an article that concentrated around a topic of the course. I am also interested in the abiotic processes and factors that are affecting ecosystems

Lead
The Lead includes an introductory sentence that mentions two possible explanations for freshwater acidification, however, it does not provide a concise and clearly described topic sentence. However, the Lead does provide brief descriptions of all the article's major sections, although the length is noticeably similar to the other sections. While I believe the Lead is well constructed, there are certain parts that should have been excluded to provide a more concise explanation of the future discussion points.

Content
The article provides relevant information to the topic, providing a comparison, explanation of causes and consequent effects from freshwatwer acidification. The most recent citation was from 2018, while a quick overview of the 'Talk' and 'View History' pages show recent activity within the last year providing an additional section and multiple peer-review edits. Without further research, I cannot say whether more content should be added, but based on what was mentioned everything seems to be covered.

Tone and Balance
The article provides a neutral tone, never promoting a biased point of view or personal opinion, and only providing facts that are always referenced. No point seems to be over or underrepresented, they all appear to have equal representation within the article.

Sources and References
In general the majority of the facts have been referenced, with the exception of three sentences. While the literature reflects the topics discussed, 8/11 articles referenced and cited were not published within the last 10 years. As a result, a more thorough and up-to-date literature search should be conducted. All the links were accessible, however, many require a subscription to access or have to be requested from an outside source.

Organization
Sentences could be more concise to present a clearer argument. There are grammar mistakes and confusing sentence transitions, which make it difficult to read and understand the flow. In addition, the article seems to be well-organized howe the structure of the paragraphs should be revised to represent a better flow and more efficiently facilitate its intent.

Images and Media
The article does include four figures that aim to enhance the understanding of the topic, but the second figure fails to comprehensively promote this basic idea. The second figure illustrates the relationship between anthropogenic CO2 and ocean acidification, which was confusing and did not relate to the topic or title, which is freshwater acidification. All the images are captioned, however, I found them to be too brief and slightly more information pertaining to the images could have been provided. The images do adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations. I found the images to be presented in an unobstructive manner that made them less distracting from the article.

Checking the talk page
There have been two posts on the Talk Page. Both were in March 2019, they added sources, reorganized its structure, added a section discerning between ocean and freshwater acidification and fixed grammatical errors. This Article was found under the Academic Disciplines category page, and was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment that had no article ratitng.

Overall impressions
Article does well covering the causes of freshwater acification and its effects, however, more up to date citations should be included. In addition, further revisions to clarify the purpose of the article and improve the concision of the article. I think the article provides a solid foundation with lots of information, however, more research should be conducted and peer-reviews should also be done to improve the article.