User:Hannahtelt/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Optic neuropathy

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 optic neuropathy because I plan to pursue a career in optometry and through my shadowing experience, I've become very interested in ocular diseases. Optic neuropathy matters because it is essentially referring to all damage inflicted on the optic nerve which is responsible for processing and converting visuals from the eye to the brain. This can in some severe cases lead to blindness. My preliminary impression of it was that it was a debilitating hereditary disease and I knew that it was caused by mutations.

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.)

The lead section's introductory sentence does not clearly explain and describe the article's topic. It is very vague and somewhat incorrect and should be slightly lengthened to include necessary information. There is a clear table of contents with the major sections of the article. There is some information in the lead section such as the discussion of retinal ganglion cells and lateral geniculate body which are not discussed any further in the rest of the article. The lead section overall is for the most part concise but lacks certain details that should be in there as a preface such as a quick description as to where the optic nerve lies and how difficult it is to be damaged. The article is fairly lengthy and speaks about many different diseases involved in optic neuropathy as well as treatment but contains only 7 references and seems to have directly taken information from those references. It also has several lengthy sections with questionable content where they connect optic neuropathy with imprisoned prisoners with nutritional deficiencies but do not give any evidence or references in which these facts may be checked. The content is not equally distributed in terms of topic importance. While the article deals directly with diseases and damage of the optic nerve, it only gives a 2 sentence description as to what the optic nerve is. The article was updated in December of 2021 so it is somewhat up to date, but some of the sources are old. The article is neutral in its tone and does not represent any disease as greater than another. There is also nothing in the article that would suggest it is trying to persuade the reader of anything. All facts in this article are not backed up by secondary sources or references. The newest reference is from 2014 while the oldest is from 1994. The sources do not seem to be from a diverse group of individuals. 4 of the sources where individual studies while 2 were general articles or books. There are better and much more recent sources available from a wide variety of relevant and acceptable organizations, studies and individuals. All but one of the links work. The article is very wordy and not easy to read as it throws in some complicated medical terminology and does not explain what it means. There are few to no grammar mistakes. It is not well organized and not easy to navigate as the information that the article should start with and introduce first is at the very end. There are absolutely no images in this article. Images would be helpful in order to visualize the layout of the eye and the severity of the various diseases. There is no talk on this article and it is rated as a start class article. It is not part of any projects. The article's overall status is poor and needs quite a bit of work. In terms of strength, it is descriptive enough and if the reader did enough research beforehand, would be able to understand most of the article in terms of medical and developmental terminology. Improvement would include adding in more background information as well as looking at much newer sources. It is not well-developed and adding in relevant and new references would make it more accurate.