User:LilyThue/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Traditional ecological knowledge

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate because this topic is becoming highly integrated into western culture now, through sustainability and through education, and the global influence it has is especially important to anthropological theory because it is combining various cultural traditions.

Lead Section
The first sentence grasps the basic definition of TEK - what and who it involves. I am not sure if talking about the controversies right off the bat is a good idea?

The last sentence in the lead section is not good. I feel like there needs to be an explanation as to why this concept could be referred to something else. Whoever wrote that gave no explanation as to why.

Content
There is some content that needs to be re-written in the contributors own words. It seems to me that there is a lot of close paraphrasing and in one section, "Differences from science" the whole paragraph is taken from one particular source, which does not support the credibility of this section. There should be a few more sources that add to the information of science vs TEK.

There are some specific case studies mentioned to describe TEK, but I fear that the choosing of which case studies to use may be ethnocentric.

I do feel that some underrepresented groups are not given the spotlight in this article. The US is clearly represented in this article, and has its own section dedicated to US environmental policy, but what about other groups? This also affects the overall balance of the article by giving lots of emphasis on US policy.

Tone and Balance
The tone and balance is relatively unbiased. There are multiple perspectives given, but again, some of these various perspectives are only cited by one person. I think there should be more sources added to each category.

In the "ecosystem management" section, there is clearly opinion written in there. Why does the integration of western science and TEK give benefits to both sides? Where are the sources?

Sources and References
There are many sources in this article, but it seems like each section or topic within this article is not given a variety of sources to stem from. Instead, there are many sections that only pull information from one source. How can we be sure it is unbiased if there is only one source claiming this information?

Organization and Writing Quality
This article is organized well enough. I may offer some suggestions to organize it in a different way, such as the "Aspects of..." section. Some of the baseline information for this section is in a subsection instead of being in the introductory section.

The writing quality is also good. I did not come across any spelling errors.

Images and Media
There are few media images that I believe contribute to the article slightly. They are described well and are linked to another wikipedia page.

Talk Page Discussions
This page is on many wiki projects, 6 to be exact. It is rated in the C class, ranging from low to high importance.

I notice that there have not been any recent updates, except for one review in 2020. Besides that, it dates back to 2017 and 2012 for the majority of the information. This is a good way for me to add some credible and informative sources on TEK in the last few years.

The people discuss broadening the topics of agriculture and environment in this topic, since they believe it to all be related or at least offer another perspective to traditional ecological knowledge.

Overall Impression
This article gives a good basic overview of what Traditional ecological knowledge is.

It can improve by maintaining a more neutral position, which may help by adding information and interpretations from various cultures. We could also remove or reword some of the lengthy conversation about US environmental policy, since I think that this is ethnocentric when discussing traditional ecological knowledge as a whole. If the article page were focused more on the relationship between TEK and science, then I can see how important it might be to implement US policy into it. This article needs to be more generalized.