User:MH0706/sandbox

= Assignments =

Article Evaluation
Assignment 1 - January 27, 2023

Evaluate the content, tone, and sources of three biogeochemical cycle Wikipedia pages, including at least one with a figure of a global cycle.

Evaluating content. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? What else could be improved? Is scientific information presented clearly, accurately, and without jargon? Does the article link to other Wikipedia articles for related topics?

Evaluating tone. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? Are there viewpoints that are over-represented, or underrepresented?

Evaluating sources. Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article? Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

Hydrogen cycle
This article on the hydrogen cycle is well-supported and all the content is relevant to the topic; however, some of the sections seem a bit anemic. I think some of the processes could be described better to illustrate the hydrogen cycle -- something like adding a diagram or picture would be very helpful, since it wasn't super evident how this process forms a circle. There is a great use of linking to other Wikipedia articles, and since I'm new to Wikipedia editing I'm not sure about the proper convention, but this article is linking to other articles primarily as a way to explain things. In other words, to fully understand the hydrogen cycle article you would have to read several other articles as well. All the information is presented without bias and has been most recently edited on December 20, 2022 so I would assume it's up-to-date.

The article is, to my best estimation, neutral. This is a difficult assessment to make, though, since I'm not an expert in this area and therefore can't point to any positions that are underrepresented. Under Implications for astrobiology the author mentions "the iron-sulfur world origin of life hypothesis" but doesn't express any support or disagreement with that view, which strikes me as a neutral position.

All the citation links I checked worked, and came from reputable publications like Astrobiology, Nature, or the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. I'm not sure if any of these sources are biased but none of them were noted as such. The article did note that hydrogenase and nitrogenase enzymes were being studied for their potential for biofuel production, and the sources associated seem definitively in favor of this method; however, the article didn't present an opinion on this method so avoids being biased. Each source I checked supported the points it directly referenced. Not every single sentence had an associated reference, but between the references and links to other Wikipedia articles that had their own references, the information was well-supported.

Nitrogen cycle
The nitrogen cycle article is incredibly detailed and thorough, much more so than the hydrogen cycle article. It includes a graphic that illustrates several key sources and sinks of nitrogen in the world, as well as the major processes that transfer it. In contrast to the hydrogen cycle article, this article includes paragraphs describing key processes and terms as well as linking to their full Wikipedia articles; this helps eliminate the need to jump around while trying to understand a single topic. There is an abundance of diagrams to help the reader fully understand the cycle, as well as important sections on the human influence on the nitrogen cycle. This article was most recently edited on December 26, 2022 so the information is likely current. The information was clearly presented but had a lot of discipline-specific language due to the nature of the article content; in these cases, it links to other Wikipedia articles the reader could check out if they need clarification.

The tone strikes me as neutral. A majority of the article is spent describing the cycle so doesn't delve into opinions, but rather lists of facts and peer-reviewed data. While the article does tackle topics like Human influences on the nitrogen cycle, all the information presented is factual and thoroughly supported by a multitude of sources.

All the citation links I checked worked, and came from reputable publications like Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and Nature. Each source I viewed supported the point the article author posited. I'm not sure if any of these sources are biased but none of them were noted as such. Not every single sentence had an associated reference, but between the references and links to other Wikipedia articles that had their own references, the information was well-supported (at 65 sources for the article, there certainly isn't a lack of references).

Phosphorus cycle
The phosphorus cycle article achieves a similar level of detail as the nitrogen cycle article, both of which contrast against the hydrogen cycle article.This article did the best job of describing the global cycle of phosphorus between the three articles, as it included both several graphics and a step-by-step description of the cycle stages. Similar to the nitrogen cycle article, this article includes paragraphs describing key processes and terms as well as linking to their full Wikipedia articles; this helps eliminate the need to jump around while trying to understand a single topic. This article was most recently edited on November 12, 2022 so the information is likely current -- but it's been over two months, so may be starting to reach the point where it isn't encompassing the most recent research in these areas. Overall, it read in a very similar manner to the nitrogen cycle article.

Similarly to the above two, the tone strikes me as neutral. The article is more a list of facts and data than anything resembling an opinion piece. Like the previous article, this one addresses human influences -- however, it does so with far fewer citations. Now six sources is nothing to scoff at, but this deficiency would certainly rank it lower in quality than the nitrogen cycle article.

Almost all the citation links I checked worked and came from more of a mix of publications than the previous two. While there are articles from publications like Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, there was one source with a broken link from enviroliteracy.org, which is a domain that no longer exists. Each source I viewed supported the point the article author posited. I'm not sure if any of these sources are biased but none of them were noted as such. This article was of a similar or greater length as the nitrogen cycle, but contained less than half the references (30 vs. 65). I'm not familiar enough with Wikipedia conventions yet to determine if this is an insufficient amount for the article length, but it certainly places it beneath the nitrogen cycle article in terms of thoroughness. Not only are there less sources, but several claims go uncited. These claims may very well be simple facts in the world of biogeochemistry, but it gave me nothing to immediately validate against, instead requiring me to do additional research to confirm.

= Practice = This is to test out citing sources. I frequently use NAIF SPICE in my research to get planetary and other celestial body ephemerides.