User:Kelsidc/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.) Behavioral epigenetics

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.)

I chose this article because I'm interested in how epigenetics regulates and modifies human behavior and cognition. This article is especially important because it provides an overview of epigenetics and some of its associated mechanisms and then attempts to connect them to more specific kinds of behaviors and mental disorders. My preliminary impression was that it is a bit redundant, but not distractingly so. I also thought that there was a heavy imbalance between the section on psychopathology and mental health and that on cognition. I think the article could benefit by attempting to show, first, how do epigenetic mechanism contribute to cognition simply, and second, how are these mechanisms altered by addiction, mental health issues, etc. In other words, it seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Otherwise, I thought it was well-written and easy to understand.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section is good, generally speaking. However, the notion of "nature versus nurture" is poorly defined and its significance is difficult to parse out within the other sections, such as the psychopathology and mental health section. It's not entirely clear that this question guides all of epigenetics research, and the writers make no attempt to back up this claim.

As for the content, as I said above, there's is a big imbalance between the cognition section and the psychopathology and mental health section. As an encyclopedic article, it should give a more comprehensive view of each of the topics in the article. This is especially true of the cognition section, because part of the implicit promise of an article on behavioral epigenitics is to explain the link between behavior and epigenetics, which includes cognition.

I do think there should be a few more figures and images throughout the article, possibly more in the "background" section.

I think the article is adequately neutral in its presentation of information.

The language of the article is clear and concise, and it's well-organized. Its topics map onto the subject matter in a way that's easy to understand.

The talk page is pretty civil. Not much has gone on in it; there's a conversation about the name of the article, and a note that a paragraph was deleted because not much information was known about it at the time. The article is part of a Wiki Education project. Its rating is a C-class.

Overall, I think this is a good article. It has helpful sections that are clearly related to the subject matter. There are a good number of review articles cited, which is good, although there is also some primary research. The "Further reading" section is also very helpful.