User:JacquelineB3/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Carrying capacity

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was one of the first topics covered in class. I think it is heavily related to the course and is a very important concept when thinking about the Earth and its various finite resources. At first glance, the article seems a bit chaotic. The language is not very uniform and much of the information is missing citations. Overall I thought the article wasn't very clear.

Evaluate the article
Clarity

The article overall lacks clarity. I thought the language used was a bit unclear. The first sentence of the article is supposed to provide a concise definition of the topic at hand, but instead I found it to be a bit of a run-on sentence. It goes: “The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained in that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available”. Instead of “… food, habitat, water, and other resources available” I would simply put “given the resources available”. Overall, I would rewrite the first sentence and try to give it a more direct definition.

The article also seems to jump from subject to subject without any flow. They go from defining carrying capacity in terms of any biological species to defining its relevance with humans, where they mention how sanitation and medical care can be considered part of the environment. This statement had no relevance to the definition of the topic and also lacked a citation.

Structure

The article overall does not share one voice. In each section it is obvious that there are different authors, and this makes the article a little difficult to understand. I thought this was clearly seen in the “factors” section where under the first formula, they list the parameters out in sentences that make up a paragraph, but then under the second formula, they list the parameters in bullet form. I preferred seeing them in bullet form and I think it will make the section a lot cleaner if both sets of parameters were presented the same way.

I also didn’t like how they used one-word titles for the different sections of the article. For instance, they wrote a whole section on the carrying capacity formula and its derivation and titled it “factors” which I though wasn’t very specific or informative. The same applies to the “humans” section, which should probably have a more specific heading like “carrying capacity of humans” for example.

Balanced Coverage

I thought this article was lacking in terms of balanced coverage. Carrying capacity is a concept that is highly regarded as a biological concept, specifically in terms of ecology. The article however barely talks about its biological application in natural environments and instead heavily focuses on the human side. Even though the article is heavily skewed towards the human perspective, it lacks a lot of information. In the “humans” section, it merely talks about the UN estimated carrying capacity of Earth. It mentions nothing about birth rates in different countries, predictions of a slowing population growth rate, solutions to such a high population, dangers of over population, etc.

Neutrality

The article is fairly neutral. Other than the fact that it is skewed toward the human perspective, all of the information is of a neutral tone, with no signs of pushing any type of agenda.

Talk Page

The talk page of this article is a little shocking. Many of the editors of this page seem to be attacking each other and are not able to discuss article changes without getting angry with each other. More than once, whole sections have been removed because editors see information being added that has non-credible citations or is just opinion based. The talk page seems to be more of a heated debate rather than a civil discussion. I think this is a major source for why this page is lacking in so many aspects. A lot of the editors seem to be trying to push their opinions into the article rather than simply adding clear and reliable information.

I mentioned before in the “factors” section that the parameters should be presented in the same format in regard to both of the formulas. I think these changes could be something useful to discuss in the talk page.

Sources

There are several claims in this article that are completely missing citations. Editors have gone through and marked them with a “citation needed”. I think overall, this article lacks a lot of information. Most of the citations used were excellent, mostly from academic journals. I did see one source however that was just a link to a website. The second citation is a link to an environmental project website, which I wouldn’t consider a great source.