User:KBMICR23/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Antiseptic

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because the discovery of antiseptics revolutionized medicine and surgical sterility protocols. Antiseptics are the second line of defense in wound care (following maintaining sterility of the site and environment if possible) by inhibiting or reducing the growth of pathogens directly on the external wound, helping in preventing infection. My preliminary impression based on the intro was that it was going to be more heavy on delving into the relevant microbial physiology and biochemical interactions than it did.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of the article contained an introductory sentence that adequately described the purpose of an antiseptic. However, the body of the lead section does not give a brief summary of the main points found later in the article, and the author has been unnecessarily heavy-handed with Wiki links (throughout the entire article). The lead section reads slightly choppy and messy at times and contains content that is not discussed in later sections.

The overall content of the article has a lot of good information in it, but the article feels unbalanced. The article has a content heading: Some common antiseptics, which lists the eight classes of antiseptics and spends a very large portion of the article bulk on long-winded explanations of some, while others have no other information than their chemical name. There are also numerous punctuation errors.

Like in the lead section, the Wiki links in the rest of the article need to be reduced greatly, and with consistency. Some referenced literature has been linked, others have not. Basic words such as tissue and pus have been unnecessarily linked as well. The author needs to think about target audiences, and while Wikipedia is a public source, the vocabulary, sentence structure, and readability of the article need to be elevated. The two photos were harmonious with the article. One had a pop-up caption, and the other had a basic one that was fine.

The resources were up-to-date, relevant, and reliable except for one: #17. The reference was pulled from Medscape.com and discussed the controversy of Hydrogen Peroxide on wounds. I believe the author should find a more reliable and neutral source if the author is intent on delving into arguments for or against the use of the different classes of antiseptics. I think re-evaluating the balance of the information provided and adjusting some of the citation locations in specific sentences would help immensely.

On the talk page, there were no open discussions specifically for this article, but the article has been classified as a C-class article for the WikiProjects: Medicine, Microbiology, and Pharmacology. In Biology, Health, the article is classified as a level-5 vital article.

Overall I think the article has a lot of promise, and has a solid foundation, but I do think it is still underdeveloped as of now. After doing some cosmetic/structural modifications, and (in my opinion) adding more about how antiseptics work on the molecular scale, and/or more detailed information about the response to Lister's paper and how that impacted our world today, the article will greatly improve. I would also possibly adjust the Surgery heading to something like History and Development or keep the first and add more information about Antiseptics in general while moving some of the information around.