User:Laurenmacky/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Galena

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the article on galena because it was listed as a level-5 vital article for Earth Sciences, yet it was ranked C-class meaning that there is still a lot of work to be done on the article. Galena matters because it an ore that can be mined to produce lead and silver; lead is mainly used for car batteries and silver is used for electronics, jewelry and medicine. My preliminary impression of the article was that there was not a lot of content; there were not many sections and certain sections only contain one or two sentences. Also, I noticed that there was a lot of information that did not contain references or had unreliable references.

Clarity
The article on galena is well-written: it is free of grammar mistakes and the information is presented in concise sentences that are easy to comprehend, making it assessable to the public. The lead section includes the most important takeaways from each of the article's major sections and does not state any information that is not discussed further elsewhere, it is a good overall summary of galena. The information in the rest of the article could be laid out in better-defined sections that make the read easier to follow. Also, there is room for a lot of information to be added. Currently, there are five headings in the following order: lead ore deposits, importance, crystal structure, geochemistry and uses of galena. Some of these sections contain only one or two sentences, whereas others contain more substantial text; sections should have similar amount of content so either information should be added or sections should be split up. I think the article should be ordered so that the basics of the structure of the mineral should come first and then build into broader topics like the uses of galena. Also, to make the progression of the article more clear the information in each section should be thought through to make sure it is not misplaced. In the lead deposits section, it is mentioned that galena was used in ancient times, yet it is left at that and not expanded on until multiple sections later in the uses of galena section; it would make more sense to move that text. Furthermore, the lead ore deposits section is a mismatch of information: how it is extracted, where deposits are located, what metals can be extracted and how it forms. There are only one or two sentences on each subject and I feel as if they would be better put into their own sections and expanded on in more detail. There could be an entire section on ore deposit locations that discusses the distribution of deposits by country, the most well-known and largest deposits, numerical data and contain a distribution map. Other sections contain so little information that I do not believe that they require an entire section. The importance section contains one sentence on galena being an official state mineral and towns being named after it; this information could be tied in somewhere else, like within talking about galena mining in the United States. The major area for improvement in this article would be to add more content; there are many important aspects of the mineral and mining that are not mentioned at all. I would suggest that the following sections be added: properties, formation, distribution, history, industry (production and consumption) and environmental/health impacts. A properties section would include information on both the physical properties (cleavage, hardness, colour, lustre) and optical properties (relief, birefringence, pleochroism). Images could be included in this section to display these properties; there is already a thin section of galena in the article but it is not discussed in any way and the caption does not help readers understand what is being shown. A formation section would discuss how galena forms, such as under what conditions (pressure, temperature), if there are multiple ways it forms and what tectonic settings. The article mentions that galena was used in ancient times and then that it was mined in the ancient mines of Sardinia; a history section could walk through how mining and the uses of galena have changed throughout time. An industry section would outline the methods behind galena mining/extraction, as well as which countries are the major producers, consumers, exporters and importers. If there is enough information on how galena mining affects environment and health then it could be its own section, or be added into industry because the health impacts of lead have affected the market. Despite the lack of information on certain topics, a strength in this article is that all of the information presented belongs in the article; it is all related to the topic of galena and addresses important features of it; there is nothing that should be cut from the article.

This article does not contain enough references for the information covered and many of the provided sources are not reliable. There are entire sections or paragraphs that do not contain a single citation backing up the information. For example, the lead section mentions that the mineral galena can occur alongside sphalerite, calcite and fluorite, but no reference is given. A reference for this claim could be Nesse (2013), which discusses that galena be can associated with sphalerite, as well as witherite. Furthermore, the lead ore deposits section has a paragraph written on silver in galena which says that a citation is needed. A reference for the amount of silver in galena is Manutchehr-Danai (2009). As for the provided references, five out of eleven are websites and travel blogs (one of which the link does not work) that do not include sources, are written by a single author, do not contain an author's name or are trying to persuade people to travel. These are not reliable references. Some of these are online mineral databases which could easily be replaced with a peer-reviewed journal or book on mineralogy like Nesse (2013). The remaining references are reliable, they are peer-reviewed journals and are relatively recent (2000-, except for a few exceptions). They come from well-known journals like Mineralogical Society of America and American Mineralogist.

The phrase "most important" is used about galena in relation to it being a lead ore and it is also called important multiple times when discussing silver. This is not neutral because it is the author's opinion that galena the most important lead ore, and it is not backed by evidence or any indication of what makes it important. There is no mention of what the other lead ores are, which someone else might argue are more important. Perhaps the article should change the claim that "[Galena] is the most important ore of lead.." to it is the abundant or something similar which can be backed by references and numerical data comparing galena to other lead ores. Calling something important is arbitrary without specifying what is important about it. Beyond this, the rest of the article is neutral. There are no viewpoints taken on a particular topic, which may be due to the fact that the article is short and is missing sections. Certain topics that are not covered like environmental impacts, health effects and mining methods would be more likely to be biased then the included topics like crystal structure, uses and geochemistry.

The main discussion of the talk page is whether or not the galena article should be merged with the lead (||) sulphide article. The argument for merging is that they have the same chemistry; they are both PbS. The argument against merging is that the lead (||) sulphide article refers to the compound, whereas galena is the mineral. I believe that the articles should remain separate entities because lead (||) sulphide discusses the properties of a single PbS compound, while galena is a repeating atomic arrangement of PbS and will have different properties. Both articles have the potential for enough material that they can stand alone. It is important to mention galena is the lead (||) sulphide article and link them to one another, which is what was settled on. There are other discussions on the properties of galena and what needs to be added to the article, such as toxicity, healing properties and the unit cell. However, many of the discussion posts do not have any responses and the most recent post was 2012. I can not comment on how the article's discussion differs from class because it has not been covered yet in class. The galena article is a level-5 vital article in Earth Science and is a part of four WikiProjects: rocks and minerals (high-importance), mining (high-importance), Wisconsin (mid-importance) and Missouri (low-importance). Despite being a part of multiple WikiProjects, the galena article is rated C-Class meaning that it needs work in terms of citations and adding content.

In conclusion, the article on galena is not well-developed and there are improvements that can be made. The strengths of the article are that the information given is all relevant and free of grammar mistakes. The weaknesses are the quality of citations, structure of sections, imbalance of section length and lack of content. As discussed above, my main suggestions for improving the article would be to reorder and divide up the sections differently, add new sections to fill in the missing information, add citations to information lacking them such as Nesse (2013) and Manutchehre-Danai (2009), and change the unreliable citations. Another suggestion that I have is make the linking to other articles consistent. In one sentence there are multiple states listed where Missouri and Wisconsin are linked to their respective Wikipedia pages, but Kansas is not.