User:Konniehatz/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cloud

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
The reason that I chose this article is because I am very interested in meteorology. I did not think that there was a requirement to stay within the Earth Science field, and seeing that my side hobby is flying planes (I am a pilot), meteorology is a subject that is very much up my alley. The reason I chose clouds in particular, is simply because I find them very cool to both observe and study.

Evaluate the article
Evaluating Content

When opening this wikipedia page, it is clear to see that the article is very well-put together. There is a ton of information that is given to the reader. Upon sifting through the information, it is clear that it is all very factual and backed up by extensive research. I found that the both the way that the information is presented (the subtitles), along with the images and tables, help to properly display a healthy amount of proper information to the reader.

When it comes to the specifics about this article, it seems that all the information is relatively up to date. There are some newer facts that have been added, for example when they discuss how clouds are the uncertainty in climate sensitivity, that have been discussed in more recent year. However for the most part, concepts such as cloud formation and cloud classification are all things that have been around for centuries, so it is not shocking to find information that could be considered older.

Overall, I find that the content of this article is great. My only critique in regards to the content is that there is a lot of information provided, all of which is not entirely necessary to the understanding on clouds. For example, one of the last sub-sections of the article relates religion and culture to clouds. Although great information to have, I think that this information would be better suited in an article which looks at a specific religion and/or culture which have a dependency on clouds. It is not relevant to the overall understanding of clouds.

Evaluating Tone

This article presents a neutral tone. After reading the entirety of the article, it is clear to see that at no point did the author use any tone that would seem biased. I also did not find that there was any points of view that were over-/under-represented. In this article, the author gives a clear indication on different subjects regarding clouds such as formation, classification, atmospheric effects, types, etc. The article is very well-rounded.

Evaluating Sources

When you scroll to the bottom of the article, there is a list of 172 references that the author used to write up the article, not to mention the extra sources that they consulted and listed off in the bibliography. The articles range from news articles, to sources that were taken from scientific papers and journals. The sources that are provided do indeed work, and are relevant to the section of the article that they are used for.

From the articles that I have looked at, they are all unbiased references and vary in terms of age. For articles which cover topics and theories that have been around for centuries, it is natural that there are some older references that have been cited however for the articles which reference newer issues and cover newer topics, the references are relatively new.

Overall Impressions

Overall, I found this article to be very well written. The information that is presented, is done so in an organized and factual way. Furthermore, the sources that are cited within the article are those that come from reliable and unbiased sources. My only critique that I have for this article would be that it contains too much information. Although somewhat all relevant to clouds, not all the information that is presented is actually important when it comes to learning about the main fundamentals of clouds. I previously gave the example of the sub-section of religion and culture as being related to clouds, but not entirely relevant to the basic understanding of what a cloud is.