User:IngridHavron/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Miller–Urey experiment - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the Miller-Urey experiment article because it is relevant to one of my class discussions about the origins of marine molecular life. This article matters because it provides evidence that the chemical origin of life started in the ocean and supports the idea of abiogenesis. My preliminary impression of the article was that it was easy to read and provided me with the information I needed. By reading only the introduction and experiment section, the reader gets a pretty clear idea of what the experiment was all about. It was also helpful that a video of the experiment was included.

Evaluate the article
The lead sentence clearly explains the topic of this article, by defining what the Miller-Urey experiment is. The lead section of this article is concise, containing just enough detail to explain the Miller-Urey experiment without discussing unnecessary minor details. The article as a whole contains only details relevant to the topic of interest, such as information on earth's early atmosphere, recent related studies, and amino acids that have been identified. This article also includes up to date information such as new amino acids that had been found from revisiting the experiment in 2007 and new information found in 2020 about the atmosphere of early earth. All information written in this article has a neutral tone and states information without possessing a specific viewpoint. Citation links work, and each source supports the claims in the article. Some sources are reliable, coming from universities and peer-reviewed journals, while others are not, coming from random websites (ex: SciTechDaily.com). Additionally, sources come from a wide array of authors. However, they are mostly male authors. When looking at the talk page, a lot of the conversations being had are analyzing information from sources that have been cited in the article. For example, one conversation on the talk page is questioning whether the number of amino acids found at a certain time period was correct, based on information in one of the sources linked. The talk page shows that the article is a B-class rated article and is a part of a WikiProject. Overall, Wikipedia discussed this topic similarly to how we talked about it in class by explaining the experiment and its original findings and later discussing the new information found when the experiment was revisited. One difference about the Wikipedia article is it also talks about other experiments similar to, or inspired by, the Miller-Urey experiment as well as extensively explaining early earth's atmosphere. On the whole, I think this was a good article that needs minor improvements. I think this article was written in a clear and concise manner, including just the right amount of information needed to understand the experiment and helpful visuals. However, I think more visuals could be included when describing the other, similar, experiments that have been performed. Additionally, I think that for the visuals that have been included, they could be captioned better. I think less information could be included in the section devoted to earth's early atmosphere. It goes in a lot more detail than is needed for the purpose of this article. Lastly, it would be nice to see only reliable sources used (ex: peer-reviewed papers) and more sources including women authors.