User:Jmarin12/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Blood Falls Talk:Blood Falls

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
The reason I chose it was because I thought that the title was interesting and it was geology category. I thought that this article was going to be about the actual physical falls: maybe why they are called Blood Falls or something relating to them.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section includes an explanation of what Blood Falls is, its location, and when it was discovered. The lead section is not overly drawn out, but it is not very concise. There was no explanation of the articles further structure.

Content

The articles content mostly speaks upon the ecosystem of Blood Falls rather than the geochemistry of Blood Falls. However, the majority of the article's content does relate back to the title in some way as only things relating to Blood Falls are discussed within the text.

Tone and Balance

The tone of the article is not very consistent. There are times when the tone feels informal, and then other instances where the tone feels overly formal. The author also uses a lot of ideas from the source material rather than the writing being a summary in their own words. The geochemistry part of the article was largely underrepresented in comparison to the implications that Blood Falls has in other areas of scientific expertise. The article also includes a paragraph about the ecosystem, which was an appropriate amount of information. Fringe viewpoints or minority viewpoints are indicated by words like "might".

Sources and References

The article does cite a fair amount of sources for the amount of material that has been published. The articles appear to be cited correctly, and none come from personal blogs or discredited websites. All of the sources cited are from scientific magazines/journals, newspapers, government resources (NASA), etc. This leads me to believe that the information within the article is largely correct. Two of three images are incorrectly cited.

Organization and Writing Quality

The author of the article wrote in a way that is fairly confusing. The beginning of each section does not start of with a signal phrase, or even an overview of what the section will be about. Some of the words included in the subtitles are formatted incorrectly (lowercase) and need to be capitalized. It also feels as if the author was making an attempt to be more formal or official by using words that were unnecessary in context of the article. There are also words that are missing where needed (such as "is"). The article is somewhat organized, but does not flow well from section to section.

Images and Media

There are a few images included in the article. However, they are extremely small and difficult to see, making them kind of unnecessary because they cannot support what the author is writing about. The image that is arguably the most easily visible is also the most important to the article, which is the picture of the actual falls that the article speaks about. Still, this image is small and not a very comprehensive photo. The author also does not credit the photographer in this image. Another one of the images is a picture of a glacier where the falls are located. This picture is cited correctly but unfortunately does not provide a lot of supporting information for the text other than proving that this glacier exists. The final image in the article is a diagram that is too small to read and is not explained.

Talk Page Discussion

The articles talk page discussion is plain bad. The talk page is extremely disorganized and confusing to read. Those commenting don't seem to have a clear perception on what is happening in the article, providing information that "might" be relevant. Their sources are also largely cited incorrectly. The article is rated at a C in most categories and is included in the Glaciers, Antarctica, Microbiology, Geology WikiProjects. It is also rated as stub-class in the New Zealand WikiProject.

Overall Impressions

My overall impression of the article is that there was content provided to the reader, but it definitely needs revisions in the way that the information was presented. The writer changed tone several times making the article confusing to read, and the scientific information needs to be better organized and more cohesive as it feels like there is a lot of filler.