User:Idm123/Evaluate an Article

6Which article are you evaluating?
Caudal luring

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 to evaluate this article as it pertains to an interesting topic within the field of animal behavior. Upon first inspection, the article seemed brief but informative.

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.)

This article on caudal luring is a good start – but it could be improved.

The lead section of this article is adequate. From the first sentence alone, a reader who knew nothing about caudal luring would have a good introductory understanding of the subject. However, the overall lead section is fairly vague and could use a little bit more detail. Additionally, the second paragraph of the lead section presents new information that lacks clarity and detail, as well as not being cited. Citations for the second paragraph are a crucial change that needs to be made to this article.

The overall content of the rest of the article is decent. The “snakes” subsection of the species section is well written and cited properly. However, the “sharks” and “other” subsections are extremely vague. The article states that caudal luring is believed to be present in pelican eels and provides a source for this claim, but does not provide any further detail on the matter. Adding more information to these sections is definitely necessary to improve this article.

Other than the second paragraph of the lead section, the article was cited well using contemporary and reputable sources. The dates ranged from 1976-2012 with most of the articles on the more recent side of that range.

The article covered caudal luring in snakes far more than in other species, but I think it stays neutral as it does not overemphasize the importance of this phenomena in snakes over other species, it just lacked information on the others. There were no attempts to persuade the readers in one direction or any bias present.

The article could use more images, for example an image of a shark species that demonstrates caudal luring rather than just the image of a snake.

The article's talk does not have many posts. One user comments on how they were unsure if this was a topic broad enough to devote an entire page to it, but were glad to see that is was. This comment provides a bit of clarity as to why this article is so vague, as it seems to be a fairly minor topic in the scope of ethology.

Overall, the article is a good start but needs work. It was clear, concise and easy to read. It provides an adequate starting point for learning about caudal luring.