User:JSteponick11/sandbox

Climate Proxies - Article Evaluation

''Questions to consider:

Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? Where does the information come from? Check the sources. Are they neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented? Check a few citations & references. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article? Is the page locked? Take a look at Wikipedia's protection policy - what is good or bad about this policy? How could it be abused? Is any information in the article that is out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?''

My comments:

The main picture at the top of the page is a graph; Personally I think the picture should be an example of a climate proxy (such as an ice core) rather than data gathered from climate proxies as it may be misleading to an uninformed audience.

I think the section where it discusses water isotopes and temperature reconstruction should appeal to a more general audience; the language is complicated and many of the terms that are used are not common knowledge to the average person, such as "isotopes" or "glacial-interglacial", as well as the formulas and chemical information that are given. Maybe these terms and formulas should be explained a little more so the average reader can understand. The "fossil leaves" section could also probably be improved upon; it's very short and it is unclear exactly what fossil leaves are as it does not explicitly state it anywhere.

Many of the sources listed at the bottom of the page seem to be slightly outdated, as many of them are from the early 2000's. Information in science, especially climate science, seems to add up exponentially over time (at least from my experience), and the historical data that we have now in 2017 may be drastically different than the data from the early 2000's due to technological advancements and a greater interest in topics regarding climate. JSteponick11 (talk) 22:48, 2 March 2017 (UTC)