User:LivyRosa/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Bamboo. But I also discuss the Bamboo cultivation article.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I found Bamboo cultivation through on the suggested directories, the WikiProjects ones, and I chose Bamboo cultivation from the forestry page because it was the only page that talked about a specific type of forest which is what I find more interesting. The Bamboo cultivation when I first looked at it seemed very short and I was wondering why it had no links to a general Bamboo description page. I also thought that despite the talk page having a section saying that climate change is of interest for this page, it didn't really have a description relating the topic to climate change. The reason why I also put Bamboo here is because the page/article Bamboo cultivation is completely plagiarized from the Bamboo article's Cultivation section, so after finding that out I decided to evaluate the Bamboo article instead of the plagiarized page. I think that the main point that they were trying to put in, which is in my opinion climate change, is important because it is a large industry and if it becomes more important to the economy in the face of climate change then people should be able to read more about and have access to the knowledge and reasoning of it.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Leading Section

The Bamboo article has a leading section that talks more about the biological aspect of the plant rather than being a summery of the whole content of the page, and the biology information that appears in the leading section does not all appear in the content later on that would fit better in the ecology section of the article. Because this article is very long and has many section topics, I can see how it would be hard to put into the leading section a mention of every single topic, but you can see more what the article will talk from the table of contents rather than the leading section. That being said, there is nothing in the leading section that is content not related to bamboo, so everything in the leading section is at least relevant. Overall, the leading section is concise but it should be switching out some of the material so that it does not include some details about the plant biology and instead a couple of brief sentences that would described what else appears in the article like traditional uses for example appears as a content section is not referred to in the leading section.

Evaluating Content/Balanced Coverage:

This article has a wide range of different subjects within it, but I think that some of them should have split into different subjects to make the sections more even. For example both the Ecology and Mass Flowering sections were fairly long compared to other sections and they could have split up a bit. Ecology could have some its contents moved into a different Biology section that could also have included some of the information from the leading section. My reasoning for this is that some of the content in ecology was the biology of the plant, like its growth rate and its growing season/maximum growing height. The Ecology section should only include information about how the plant interacts with environment, its living and non living factors, like the rhizomes and the freeze tolerance. The Mass Flowering Section should probably have some its information in a separate Reproduction section, especially since another separate Bamboo blossom exists to explain this pheromone. But I don't find that the Mass Flowering section does a good job of explaining what the reproduction of bamboo is like so I think a separate section is needed. I also think that within the Mass Flowering section there is too much information of the possible and more recent explanations for the evolution of mass flowering and that it should be cut down and edited because I found those multiple short paragraphs hard to follow.

While the Mass Flowering section is probably too long for this article, there were other section that were very short and made the different subjects imbalanced. However, several of the short sections have links to separate pages like the Bamboo blossom page is linked at the Mass Flowering section. So for the sections that have other Wiki pages existing for that topic, it makes sense that the section only a shorter summery and if you want more information you go to the main pages for that topic which is also why I think that the Mass Flowering section should be shorter, because the information can be found in Bamboo blossom.

Clarity:

Some of the article has sentences here and there that are not well thought in my opinion. For example, in the leading section it discusses how grasses grow rapidly in detail and then in the next sentence tells us how the rapid growth and the tolerance for marginal land give bamboo certain properties. My problem with this is that it just described rapid growth of bamboo thoroughly but then throws in the tolerance for marginal land without any details on that aspect of bamboo growth. So to me this a sentence that is lacking background information since one element in the sentence was just given background details. When I was reading this it made me feel like I was missing background information so they should have organized the information there a little bit differently like excluding some details to be moved into the content area of the article. For the most part, the rest of the article is composed of well-written sentences with a good flow of the information so that readers can follow along without missing information and having to re-read. Although, there are a few other sentences that I thought were a little cut off, like in the Distribution section where it said that the US was growing bamboo but they didn't mention where in the US it was grown.

Neutrality:

I don't really notice any biases in the article especially because its mostly just factual information and not a topic with conflicting interests. I can tell that there are sections with less written and some with more written which points out attention to detail that varied depending on the topic. For the short sections I can't tell if the lack of information would be a bias against the topic, but could have been a lack of information. For the longer section, like Mass Flowering there is more information than needed given that a separate page with all that information already exists, but I can't say for sure that it's a longer section because there was a bias in the authors. So there are subjects that are over-represented in this article and that should be edited to cut down on their content as it exists in another page. Overall, I didn't notice any opinions that were outright stated in the article and there are not opposing viewpoints that has one side described more than the other side.

Sources:

This is a long article and is has 68 references which to me indicates that this page is well researched, but the sources are not well spread over the article so some areas are not as well researched as other. The sources does contain a lot of journal articles and I noticed several books as well which indicates that a lot of the information is coming higher quality sources. There are some news articles but with the number of references I think that its expected that there are some non-academic ones and that there are enough academic sources to ensure that the information should be accurate. The sections where I did notice there being less references are the Attributions of character section in its last paragraph, the subsections under Uses and some of the subsections under Uses. And lastly, the Cultivation section and the Construction sections both have a citation needed notice so at least some areas have been flagged for citation warning but it still means that readers can't find a source for that information.

Talk Page:

The talk page has several sections to it, a couple where someone describes the changes to external links, some where people have noticed an issue and left a notice and one more where someone was asking which section should a certain picture fit into. To me, the one comment where someone pointed out an issue of language being too informal and a lack of sources is very useful and important comment. Although they didn't have the sources to cite the information in The Uses and the Bamboo working sections they left a notice of where references were needed which is useful to know when you go in to edit.

Suggestions for Improvement:

I did already suggest some edits for improving the article through some of the things I've noticed in the other sections. These would be cutting down on the Mass Flowering section and adding some references to certain sections of the article. But I also think that in the Cultivation section, the one that was made into a separate page, Bamboo cultivation, could have used more information about how this plant will be of greater importance or of more use throughout climate change or maybe a separate section for climate change. While Bamboo cultivation had climate change in its talk page listed as a WikiProject, Bamboo does not have climate change listed as a WikiProject despite their mention in several places that bamboo is a good plant for growing in climate change and for carbon sequestration. I think that the separate page of Bamboo cultivation should be deleted since it was all plagiarized from the main Bamboo page and that the people interested in Bamboo cultivation and how it will change during climate change should just add in the talk page of Bamboo the climate change WikiProject to show that this information should be added to this page.

Overall, I think that this is a good page. I liked that some of the sections linked to where a whole page existed for that specific topic, because if you didn't know about that aspect of bamboo you can learn here that exists, read a smaller summery, and then clink to a different page for more information. Generally, the sentences and the grammar were very good which makes the article easier to read. This page also had a lot of images and the visuals matched to the information and made the page more enjoyable.