User:Jfulgini/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Cave)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(My wikipedia article in the future will relate to microbes in caves, so I chose this specific article in order to provide an introduction to the cave environment and the many different types of caves that exist. I thought this article did a good job summarizing the different types of caves along with providing informative, brief information relating to the processes that occur in each environment.)

Evaluate the article
Lead section: The opening section clearly identifies and defines the subject of the article, but does not introduce the article's main section. I do not think this is bad, given the wide variety of material that would have had to been covered in the opening paragraphs. The content section does a good enough job of familiarizing me with the direction of the article. The lead does not introduce any foreign material that is not covered in the subsequent sections.

Content: The article's contents are relevant to the subject, contain all necessary subsections, and are up to date.

Tone and balance: The article does not contain any subject matter related to politics and is pretty neutral. In terms of viewpoints being underrepresented, I though that the "Formation Type" section did not do the best job of describing Fracture,Talus, Anchialine formations. Although the other sections contained enough sentences to fully describe each formation, these three sections only contained two sentences at most. Overall, the article was informative and refrained from a persuasive attitude.

Sources and references: I think that the authors did a good job of citing information and listing references. As mentioned before, citations are up to date and are listed at the end of most sentences/sections that offer a wealth of information. There were 29 references in total, which I believe is sufficient for an article of this size. However, I would've liked to see a greater number of citations behind each fact provided. Whenever a citation was needed, very rarely was there ever more than one citation provided. If I had one complaint, it would be that the article could have been a bit more thorough with researching and citations. I would like to see multiple citations behind facts that are known to be more heavily researched by scientists. I would also like to see a couple paragraphs per section.

Organization and images: The article is well written, well organized, contains no grammatical errors, and is concise. Sections that contained enough information were not too long and hit on most points that needed to be addressed. Images were properly labeled based on the name of each cave as well as their locations. The images capture attention but do not provide additional information, rather they provide specific examples of each formation type. Links and references work.

Talk pages: The talk page is incredibly active, which should be the case for such a generalized article. Discussions range from changing images to editing subsections for what other authors appear to view as errors. The article is a part of four wiki projects that rate the article as a B-/C+ based off of importance. I think the authors of this page do a great job with keeping the talk page civil and informative, which is what the wikipedia training has emphasized time and time again. However, there were a few authors in the talk section that had very questionable feedback.

Overall Impressions: The article's status of a B- I think is deserved. Although the article was informative and mentioned all relative subjects, there were a few sections that did not cover enough depth. The authors of this article could have provided more citations for a few sections as well. In my eyes, the authors of this article need to add to sections that were visibly underwhelming (Formation Type section), which would improve the quality of the article by making it a more complete article.