User:Jordamal/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Evaluated Article: Ocean Chemistry

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

The chemistry of the ocean is important to consider for the climate change and the global carbon cycle. This article gives insight into ocean chemistry and the impacts humans have on the ocean, including pollution and acidification. The information presented is concise and written in a way that can be understood by a general audience. There were several useful links throughout the page that can be reference for further detail.

Lead Section
The topic of interest, ocean chemistry, is clearly defined in the lead section. There is a strong introductory sentence that includes multiple links to aspects that influence the chemistry of the ocean. A table of contents with links to each section and subsections, but a description of the major sections has been omitted. Overall, the lead is concise with enough detail to capture the attention of the viewer.

Content
The article's content is mostly relevant with the exception of the final section discussing the ocean chemistry of other planets and their moon. Compared to the rest of the article, this section could serve as a bridge to a different topic rather than an extension of the one at hand. The information presented is up to date, where the most recent reference was published in September of 2020 and the most recent revision was posted in August of 2021.

Tone and Balance
The article is written from a neutral perspective and is mostly free of bias. Reviewing previous talk discussions, the section on climate change was previously biased towards mankind's affect. However, the content appears to have been updated since.

Sources and References
The sources have been updated through article revisions, with references ranging from 1994 to 2020. Most sections have been supported by at least one reference except for the section titled "chemical ecology of extremophiles" which has uses no sources. Although some references have been pulled from websites, a majority of come from relevant journals. Based on the sources that have been tested, the links appear to be fully functional.

Organization and Writing Quality
The article is written for a general audience but provides links to other pages to provide additional detail for interested viewers. The information is broken up well into the sections listed in the table of contents, but some sections have much more detail than others. Merging the short sections is not necessary, however more detail would be useful to for the audience to get a firmer grasp on the material.

Images and Media
Although few images are used, they are related to the overall. Neither of the images include much description which could make it difficult for someone who isn't familiar with the topic to understand. Captions are present but are short. The images are laid out in an appealing fashion, however their placement doesn't directly correspond to the surrounding text.

Talk Page Discussions
The talk page has had very few interactions. The oldest comment which addressed bias in the article appears to have been addressed through the revisions made. The most recent discussions have been about changing the article's name and merging to another article, neither of which impact the information presented.The article has a C-class, low-importance rating for the Oceans, Chemistry , and Climate change WikiProjects and a start-class, high-importance rating in the Limnology and Oceanography WikiProject.

Overall Impressions
Overall, the article was very well-written. Although the last section is not fully necessary and could likely be removed, the rest of the article gives enough detail to be able to appeal to a general audience. The subsections could go more in depth into the respective topics, but the use of links was a clever way to avoid passing unnecessary information. The sources are distributed well throughout, but one section lacks supporting detail outside of linked Wikipedia pages.