User:Horseshoecrab3/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Environmental impact of pharmaceuticals and personal care products

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was listed as an available article for our Toxicology class to edit and I am interested in researching the environmental impacts of pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

This topic matters because pharmaceuticals and personal care products are emerging contaminants - the effects of which are not yet well known and are still being studied.

My preliminary impression of the article was that it contains a lot of information, but more updated information is needed in some areas and information needs to be streamlined in other areas.

Evaluate the article
The article's introductory sentence does not clearly/concisely describe the article's topic. It begins with how long they have been investigated, but it should instead start by defining what pharmaceuticals and personal care products are and how they impact the environment. The lead section does include a brief description of the article's major sections, but this could do a better job of highlighting important information. The lead section contains one piece of information about how the European Union has designated pharmaceuticals and personal care products with the capacity to contaminate soil and water as "priority substances" which is not mentioned in the article later on. The lead paragraph could use more structure and addition of important points while removing details unnecessary to the summary.

The article's content is relevant to the topic, but could use updated information. Knowledge of the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals and personal care products has changed considerably since 2009 when the article was first written. There are more examples such as hormones and medications that can be described further.

This article has been written with a fairly neutral point of view being that it mainly states facts. The wording in the effects section may need to be edited to ensure that the article's tone remains balanced and unbiased.

Several pieces of information in the article are missing citations. Most of the information is reliable from peer-reviewed, academic, or governmental sources, but most of the sources are also outdated.

For the most part, the writing is straightforward and organized into sections, however, some improvements to grammar and sentence-structure would enhance its clarity.

The article includes well-captioned images that facilitate comprehension of the topic and do not appear to violate Wikipedia's copyright violations.

Since the original author created and edited the article in 2009, the talk page indicates that there have been few edits to the article since then. The changes that have been made are minor. The article was originally written by a student for a class; the read tab contains a class assessments section that contains critique from this student's peers. Other edits include modifying external links and merging content from other Wikipedia articles including environmental effects of pharmaceutical packaging and environmental impacts of nail polish remover. The article is rated B-class for WikiProject Environment, C-class for WikiProject Pharmacology, and C-class for WikiProject Sanitation.

Overall, the article has a good foundation with relevant organized information and images, but needs work to create a better summary for the lead section and to incorporate up-to-date information with cited sources.