User:Laurendpeters/sandbox

Article Evaluation:

The article I read was called Comfort behaviour in animals. The content in the article was relevant to the topic, however it was very brief and did not go into significant detail to explain the points the author discussed. For instance, the definitions given for comfort and maintenance behaviours at the beginning of the article did not particularly explain what these behaviours involve. Instead, the author used examples of the types of behaviours that fall into these categories. At the end of the article, there is a list of comfort behaviours and although some of these behaviours are very basic, one cannot assume that all of the readers will know what each behaviour entails or means. Therefore it would have been useful for the author to give a sentence or two to explain each behaviour as opposed to only listing the names of the various behaviours.

The article is neutral as it is not a subject that requires the author to take a certain position on the matter. It is strictly explaining a concept as opposed to giving an opinion, there is no use of first, second or third person references in the article. As the article progresses to further explain comfort behaviours, the author does not include many details about it, which is rather surprising since it is the main topic of the article. The use of sentences that say "for example," and give various examples without adding any additional content to the sentence were used in the article. These types of sentences are not a sophisticated way to present information. There should have been more substance included to elaborate and explain the points in more depth and for clarification for the reader. An additional suggestion for the content is that there could have been more elaboration in other sentences, one in particular for instance said, "comfort behaviours are performed from an early age and change during development". There is no explanation of how the behaviours change during development or how the behaviour start originally at young ages. Small additions to these types of points could really help to make the article more interesting and informative. Another situation where more information could have been given in the article is when the author claims that comfort behaviours can be associated with physiological changes and they proceed to give only one example about changes in a horse. This could have been elaborated by giving several examples of different animals enduring physiological changes as a result of these behaviours. The typical changes frequently observed or expected in general for several animals could have also been discussed.

Most of the citation links worked well, for one in particular, you would need to log in and set up an account with a microsoft program to access the source, which is not convenient for users who do not have this type of account. One source titled, Heart rate reduction in horses from grooming, did not appear to be a published paper as it contained telephone and fax numbers in the heading of the article. It appears to be a university paper, however it was not published from a scholarly journal or what appeared to be a reputable source. A website that was used as a source was not a scholarly website. It was created by an individual that did not cite any sources in their work and it did not appear to be professional nor a trustworthy source. For instance, the pictures on the website about birds contains pictures of glass and porcelain birds as opposed to real birds. The entire comfort behaviour article only used four sources in the main information paragraph. There are several sentences that give information and do not include footnotes to a source which could be problematic as perhaps not all of the information was properly credited with a source.

There are not many previous conversations on the talk page. There was one comment left by someone who said they reverted the spelling of behaviour to the American spelling style. I left an additional comment on the page to let the author know that I noticed a grammatical error in the article, the word categorized was spelt incorrectly as "categorised". The article does not appear to be part of any WikiProjects.

We have not yet talked about these types of behaviours covered in the article in class yet as we have just recently finished the history section of the course and started genetics today. Perhaps as the material progresses we will study comfort behaviours in animals.

Choosing possible topics (Assignment 5):

The first article I found that is of interest to me for a potential paper topic is called Companion dog. This article is fairly brief, including only four small sections (working vs. companion, competition obedience titles, companion vs toy dogs and list of companion dogs). I would like to elaborate more on why companion dogs are important and how they are beneficial through their behaviours and actions. As mentioned on the talk page for this article, the "competition obedience titles" section is not very relevant for this topic. I would perhaps remove this section to incorporate one instead that elaborates on the typical behaviours displayed in companion dogs. I would also research the history on how these dogs were shaped to become companion dogs (domesticated) from wild animals and provide a historical background about this at the start of the article. The companion vs toy dog section is not very useful to this article. It does not provide a detailed contrast between the two categories and it would also need to include more information. I would also add into the list of companion dogs section that it does not include all possible types of companion dogs.

Another article that would be of interest for the paper is Canine cognitive dysfunction. This article talks about dogs that exhibit similar symptoms as those found in humans with dementia. This would be an interesting topic to explore as I have often been curious to find out whether dogs or even animals in general can suffer from mental illnesses similarly to humans. The article I found on wikipedia about this topic does not elaborate significantly on the clinical signs of this illness in dogs. I think it would be important to find out additional information on how it can be detected and the symptoms should be explained in more detail as opposed to using general terms. The treatments section of the article is also not very detailed. The lists for the possible medications given to the dogs to alleviate the symptoms does not include significant details for specifically how the medications help or improve the symptoms. On the talk page for the article is says it is part of the WikiProject Dogs and therefore there are no personal comments made from other users on wikipedia.