User:Leafcutter Ant/Choose an Article

Article Selection
Please list articles that you're considering for your Wikipedia assignment below. Begin to critique these articles and find relevant sources.

Option 1

 * Stream

Article Evaluation:

 * This article, while promising, suffers from undersourcing and poor structure. The article functions not only as an encyclopedia article for streams and their properties, but also serves as a landing page for related bodies of water or marine ecology concepts. I found that the areas most in need of improvement are the "Sources" and "Characteristics" sections of the article. Within these two sections, not a single sentence is sourced, and there is lots of room for elaboration. Upon further, inspection, some lines are highly paraphrased and borderline plagiarized. Furthermore, the Talk page points to a need for increased discussion on intermittent streams as well as providing a more accurate narrative of the names of streams in other countries outside the United States. I also would like to see the "Other Terminology" section get restructured — it is odd that such a section is just thrown into the middle of the article, especially without any descriptive paragraph or explanation for its presence.

Sources:

 * https://archive.epa.gov/water/archive/web/html/streams.html -- discusses the sourcing of stream water, as well as the benefits of streams
 * https://extension.arizona.edu/sites/extension.arizona.edu/files/pubs/az1378g.pdf -- discusses characteristics and channeling processes of streams

Option 2

 * Gravidity and parity

Article Evaluation:
This article could benefit from increased sourcing and more detail surrounding the purpose of definitions for human gravidity and parity, rather than simply listing the terms. The structure is also difficult to follow, with some sections not being subheading when they should, and the use of unclear pronouns that don't make it clear what term the author is discussing. The most recent discussion on the Talk page concerns more effort being put into explaining why certain distinctions are used, such as the health implications for grand multiparity vs. primigravida and so forth. There are sources that discuss why doctors decided on these intervallic measures, and it would be relevant to include them in the article. Furthermore, there is a section in the article titled "Gravidity in Biology," which is merely two unsourced sentences defining "gravid" as it relates to female fish, reptiles, and insects that fertilize eggs externally. It would be useful to expand this portion of the article, since currently it is vague and uninformative. It would also be useful to add a section on parity in ecology, and discuss animal and plant parity.

Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851134/ -- discusses some of the correlated benefits of increased gravidity and its negative relationship with colorectal cancer incidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3878019/ -- discusses origins of multiparity as a distinction used in human medicine, and whether it is still a risk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648687/ -- discusses that parity among organisms exists along a continuum, ranging from semel to iteroparity.

Option 3

 * Carrying capacity

Article Evaluation
Overall, the main flaw of this article is its lack of focus on specific examples within the field of population ecology. Interestingly, the article focuses its real-world examples to those in agriculture and fisheries, but only dedicates a few (unsourced) generalizations about wild populations in general. Considering the focus of the course, it would be useful for me to invest in fleshing out this section of the article by pulling from studies of wild populations. Hopefully, I can provide a more nuanced overview of the different factors that might affect wild populations and how growth models may differ depending on resource abundance and species characteristics.

Option 4

 * Competition (biology)

Article Evaluation:
While this article touches on many of the main topics of biological competition (and nearly everything we discussed in our lecture on competition), it needs to go into more detail regarding the mechanisms of competition. Additionally, much more could be written about size asymmetry and intraspecific competition — although there are main articles that discuss these forms of competition in greater depth, the current descriptions are inadequate and do not allow readers to gain a full picture of the situation. I would also be interested in potentially including more graphics and charts. For example, it would be great to include graphs of character displacement among Darwin's Finches and other more graphical representations of the evolution of competition.

Option 5

 * Mark and recapture

Article Evaluation:
The lead paragraph provides a simple and straight-to-the-point explanation of mark-recapture, but more should be added to preface all of the sections discussed in the article. The content of the article focuses mostly on the various statistical estimators that scientists use in mark-recapture studies, but this is not foreshadowed in the intro. Additionally, the intro focuses heavily on applications in ecology and epidemiology, but there lacks a section that explores these applications in more detail. The content of the article could include many more specific examples of mark-recapture studies done in scientific fields, and it could also benefit by including more work done by scientists on the subject post-2010.

The article is also in need of more reliable and current sources. Near the end of the article, there is an uncited line that reads: "The literature on the analysis of capture-recapture studies has blossomed since the early 1990s." However, no literature is mentioned, nor is that somewhat opinionated claim referenced. The images of tagging typically used on animals are great, but it would be great to have graphics which explain the process of mark-recapture more visually. The article is well-written, but the organization could be improved -- there are very long sections followed by others that are bare bones and consist of only a sentence or two. The Talk Page for the article is also quite involved and sophisticated, but it does not seem to have been updated since 2019, indicating that the page is in need of some updating