User:Makenna.luke/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Diabetes alert dog

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am interested in the science behind dogs being able to detect low or high blood sugar related to diabetes. The history behind the discovery of this is also very interesting and was a key reason why I chose it. It also related to communication due to the fact that dogs in general are able to communicate things to humans that they are not even fully aware of happening around them. This topic matters because there has been many journal articles explaining the science behind what diabetes is and how it occurs in the body but there is no cure to it so being able to manage it such as with a dog could be beneficial information that the public should be aware of. This topic is also not commonly talked about for instance at this time we often only speak about emotional support animals or the K-9 unit in police departments in my generation so being able to explore and learn about different ways we can use animals to help the public is very beneficial. From first glance this article seemed interesting but was lacking a lot of in-depth information that would make it better. It also did not seem to use the sources that it has in the most beneficial way I felt there could have been more information gathered and incorporated from the sources the previous editor had chosen. I also would like to add more history on the science behind how they figured out dogs can help detecting high or low blood sugar and how they are trained to be able to communicate with humans to help them.

Evaluate the article
This article has a good lead sentence that described the topic of diabetic alert dog and gave a concise definition of what it is and how they work. The rest of the beginning paragraph does not describe or give entail of what the rest of the article will be about. It also does not have a clear flow of where the information is going. It begins by talking about what a diabetic alert dog does briefly to how they detect hypoglycemia and then to the history of the first diabetes alert dog. There should be separate sections with more details about each key point that is trying to be made. For instance, there should be more information about how the diabetic alert dog detects the hypoglycemia, how they are trained to be able to detect that, how they alert the human based on their symptoms or scent, and add more scientific evidence of the reliability of the dogs ability to detect it. The overall grammar and spelling was correct in this article but it could use better flow when it comes to the sections so that it is not repeating information more than once. The sources that are used are relatively up to date and current but the usage of those sources could be improved. For instance, only one of the sources is from a scientific journal whereas the others are from other sources that may not be fully reliable. With that being said there should be more information used from those sources the article all together doesn’t seem to have a lot of usage of them so it would be more beneficial if there were either more sources or additional content from the current sources present. I would suggest going on to google scholar and finding more peer reviewed articles to use as sources for this topic. This article is apart of the disability wiki project and was rated a start-class with high-importance but it has not had any recent conversations on the talk page. The other comments that were made included expanding on the citations which was previously discussed in the evaluation. This article has a lot of potential and is worth investing time into but it is far from being complete. Overall, this article is a good baseline for general information but it does leave room for improvements and adjustments that can be easily fixed in the near future.