User:Katelyn Amoss/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating
Dewclaw

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it is a topic that comes up quite often in my desired career field, veterinary medicine. Personally my dog has a dewclaw that was improperly removed so she only has the one, so I thought it would be interesting to learn more about it. First impressions are this article is greatly lacking in information and is kind of vague.

Evaluate the article
The article starts off with an introduction explaining what a dewclaw is, so that was beneficial. The rest of the introductory paragraph does not prepare the reader for the topics being discussed in the rest of the article. There is also very little specification as the article multiple times says "some animals" or "many animals" instead of giving examples. They do include some species as examples but would sound more certain in their statement if they removed the unclear statements. The introduction does mention the main sections of dog, cat and hoofed animals, but does not include the subcategories, removal and locomotion. The introduction tales about the presence in digitigrades and unguligrade and how it doesn't touch the ground, but then contradicts that statement in the hoofed animal section. Moving on to the content, it is evident that one section was given much more attention then the others. The dog section was given three sub sections with about a paragraph for each part with several photos. The cat section was given a total of four sentences and no pictures while the hoofed was given about a paragraph and one photo. I suggest putting a lot more information into primarily the cat section. The subsections are relevant to the article overall, so I suggest including them for the other species as well. It would be beneficial to elaborate on the uses of dewclaws in cats and why they shouldn't be removed. The same goes for hooved animals, if in some species such as cattle have ones that don't ever touch the ground why aren't they removed? going into more detail about that will created a more even and rounded article. This article topic is pretty neutral to begin with, so there is little to no bias. The tone of this article is a combination of casual and scientific. for the most part the language of the the text is very simple and easy to understand, but random inclusions of scientific jargon makes the text a little confusing. It would be best to stick to one or the other. Considering this is not a scientific article and the audience is the general public a more casual tone could be helpful. The article has a basic skeleton for organization, but still needs to be filled in with more information. There are sections of the article that could be cleaned up for clarity, for example "Dogs almost always" could be switched to "most dogs" which has the same meaning but is easier to read. There are several instances where simple rewording of a sentence would greatly aid with clarity. The images that are used are relevant and useful in showing what the author is talking about, but the second and third image's caption are worded in such a way that brings about confusion. If both claws touch the ground while running why is the older dogs longer? If rewarded, this question may be answered. Looking at the talk page many of my own concerns, more information on cats and lack of clarity, have been addressed. Noting that the latest talk page post was April 1, 2018. These issues are still present in the article. They also talk about misinformation and a bias against declawing, in my opinion the bias has been changed and almost removed. They say there is debate about it and then proceed to briefly explain how the process works. This article is a part of three WikiProjects (Animal Anatomy, Dogs, and Cats) and are rated C in all three projects. Overall I think this article could use a lot of work, both in information included and clarity of words. The article is underdeveloped hey have a good start and structure, so adding more information and filling in gaps shouldn't be terribly difficult.