User:Kbgsu25/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
https://w.wiki/98Z3 Tree of life (biology)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I've chosen this article to evaluate because I find the topic interesting and the subject matter pertains to this class (Invertebrate Zoology). This article is important because it highlights how, over time, live organisms have been classified in order to construct a "tree of life". My preliminary impression of this article was that it provided a lot of background history on how tree diagrams came to be.

Article Evaluation
I believe this article has a good lead section because it briefly introduces the topics discussed in the article in a clear and concise manner. The only thing the lead section failed to mention was the topic of horizontal gene transfer and how that affects the root of the tree of life. I would recommend adding that topic towards the end of the lead section and tying in an introduction into the discovery of how horizontal gene transfer has impacted the modern tree of life diagrams.

In my opinion, I feel like the title could reflect the content of the article a little better. This article is heavily history-based, so hinting towards history in the title would add more context. The article's content is relevant to the topic and the content seems up to date (the last edit was in January 2024). The topic being covered is greatly covered in phylogeny and phylogenetic tree articles.

The claims throughout the article didn't seem to be heavily biased and there wasn't any indication of persuasion, but the section labeled "Haeckel" was very underrepresented.

Most of the sources were really credible, but some sources were from scientific magazines, which sometimes aren't as reliable as peer-reviewed scientific papers. The more credible sources were very thorough on the topics/claims that were being presented. A lot of the sources, however, were more than ten years old.

The article was well written and easy to comprehend with little to no grammatical errors present. I do think that the article should add more section to cover all of the major topics, as the "tree of life" is a major subject with many topics relating to it. For example, I would write more about how modern tree of life diagrams are constructed and how the discovery of more species shifts the aspects of the tree.

The pictures used are detailed and reflect the topics being talked about. A couple of the pictures were under public domain, but some where taken from a book. The pictures that were taken from the book were credited to the authors of the book, but there wasn't any proof of public domain or any free licensing.

The talk page is full of meaningful discussions on how to better the article. There are debates on how the article should be structured, whether or not certain information is relevant to the topic, and whether or not certain sections in the article should be updated to reflect new discoveries. This talk page digs deeper into how Darwin's thoughts and discoveries contributed to tree of life diagrams.

This article overall is good, but it needs to be more decisive on the central theme of the topic. A lot of the article focuses on history, but it needs to cover other aspects of the topic (or change the title to reflect just the history of the tree of life). The article is a little underdeveloped, but it seems like editors are currently working on ways to improve it.