User:MeganOBrien97/sandbox

Reflective Essay

Critiquing articles

The training modules on the Wiki Education Dashboard were very helpful in guiding the article evaluation, as well as the rubric provided by the professor. To critique the article, I used the categories on the rubric which were clarity, structure, balanced coverage, neutrality, talk page, sources, and suggestions for improvement. Finding an article to evaluate was difficult, many of the articles I was interested in were established, well developed and almost professionally edited. But I was able to find resource depletion which was a start class article and had a lot of room to improve. The training module on the etiquette of talk pages was very clear on how to interact with other editors, when looking at the talk page for resource depletion editors left comments unsigned and were often rude, unhelpful and did not actually make edits but just suggested what should be done.

Summary of my contribution

To the Wikipedia article Resource Depletion I’ve added to and edited the introduction, added a section on Resource Accounting and on Groundwater depletion. What I've added does help the article but there is still a lot of room to improve this article.

Peer review:

I did not give a peer review to any of the articles the other students were working on and none of the other students provided any to my article. I think that the way Wikipedia is set up and how the assignment is set up is not conducive to have students interact with it. In my opinion doing a essay and having everyone peer review would have worked out better.

Feedback:

I did not receive any feedback from other Wikipedia editors, the talk page has not been active since June 2018.

Wikipedia generally:

From this assignment I’ve come to understand that Wikipedia is very useful for the general public to gain a basic understanding of a topic, there is a page on every subject. If one wants to learn more the reference section at the bottom of the page makes it perfect for the reader to access primary sources. The sites also have links to other Wikipedia articles which make it easy to go from one topic to another. In my opinion as an assignment for a university course, Wikipedia is not structured well. Many of the topics that interested me on resources were already professionally written and edited, there was not much to add or work on. Trying to understand how to use the sandbox and the format of Wikipedia is not straightforward, I did not find that the course and the TA’s were well equipped to support the students and the issues we faced with Wikipedia. Working in the sandbox what I learned was that I should have worked in a word document first because there were several times where I worked in the sandbox, saved my work and then returned to my sandbox the next day and my work was gone. I was not able to recover any of it and did not understand what had happened. I think that writing a paper would have been much better as there would have been more participation and I could have written about something I was more passionate about.

Choosing a topic for an article

Resource Depletion

Article Evaluation:

Resource Depletion

Clarity:

The page has clear sub-topic titles, which encompasses the subject. The introduction defines what resource depletion is, and that natural resources are divided into renewable and non-renewable resources, but besides that the introduction does not provide any other insight into the rest of the page or any other information. The sentences are short and do not connect or follow any flow with one another. The sub-topic Effects is simply a list relating to other Wikipedia articles but does not provide any supporting information as to how these effects are caused or impact the surrounding environment.

Structure:

The structure of the page is well laid out and the sub-topics are a good start to the article. The page starts with a list of types of resource depletion, then goes on to detail some of the subjects on the list but uses different names and does not cover all of them in a balanced way. The page its self needs a more consistent structure as the sub-topics go from bullet points to full paragraphs with no real reasoning behind the change.

Balanced Coverage:

The page is written from an environmentalist point of view and does not accurately cover the topic completely, in the wetlands subtopic they provide ideas like; wetlands provide environmental service for; and then lists the different impacts but does not explain how wetlands does this or why this is relevant to Resource Depletion. The writer opens each sub-topic stating how important this resource is but does not actually develop this idea or provide any supporting information.

Neutrality

Looking at the talk page there as been issues in the past with the article having biased statements an example would be "The environment is being abused" which has since been removed. When reading the article there is still a clear bias in the writing leaning towards conservationism. The article often goes off topic and does not actually talk about resource depletion and its causes and effects but often takes an emotional perspective on the negative impacts of resource depletion.

Talk Page:

When looking at the talk page, it is clear there has been some editing, but mainly the editing has just been deleting unrelated and bias information. Those that have gone through the page have not contributed much, but have given suggestions to what should be added. Some editors have remained unsigned and left comments saying "This looks like something a high school student wrote" which is not helpful or relevant to the improvement of the article.

Sources:

The page has good sources, but the page does not use them to their fullest potential. The page is also missing citations in very important areas. An example is from the sub-topic renewable resources. "The two main sources of renewable energy are solar energy and wind power." There needs to be a citation as to where the writer received this information. More sources need to be added and all information taken from sources must be cited.

Suggestions for improvement:

The page has serious room for improvement. The sub-topics need to be developed and improved in information and how the ideas are developed throughout the page.

Resource Depletion Draft

Depletion Accounting

In an effort to offset the depletion of resources theorists have come up with depletion accounting or better known as 'green accounting'. Depletion accounting aims to account for nature's value on an equal footing with the market economy. Resource depletion accounting uses data provided from countries to estimate the adjustments needed due to their use and depletion of the natural capital available to them. Natural capital are natural resources such as mineral deposits or timber stocks. Depletion accounting factors in several different influences such as the number of years until resource exhaustion, the cost of resource extraction and the demand of the resource. Resource extraction industries make up a large part of the economic activity in developing countries, this in turn leads to higher levels of resource depletion and environmental degradation in developing countries. Theorists argue that implementation of resource depletion accounting is necessary in developing countries.

Importance of Measuring Resource Depletion

There are many different groups interested in depletion accounting. Environmentalists are interested in depletion accounting as a way to track the use of natural resources over time, hold governments accountable or to compare their environmental conditions to those of another country. Economists want to measure resource depletion to understand how financially reliant countries or corporations are on non-renewable resources, whether this use can be sustained and the financial drawbacks of switching to renewable resources in light of the depleting resources.

Issues with Depletion Accounting

Depletion accounting is complex to implement as nature is not as quantifiable like cars, houses or bread. For depletion accounting to work, appropriate units of natural resources must be established so that natural resources can be viable in the market economy. The main issues that arise when trying to do so are, determining a suitable unit of account, deciding how to deal with "collective" nature of a complete ecosystem, delineating the borderline of the ecosystem and defining the extent of possible duplication when the resource interacts in more than one ecosystem. Some economists want to include measurement of the benefits arising from public goods provided by nature, but currently there are no market indicators of value. Globally, environmental economics has not been able to provide a consensus of measurement units of nature's services.

Groundwater

Water is an essential resource needed to survive everyday life. Historically, water has had a profound influence on a nation's prosperity and success around the world. Groundwater is water that is in saturated zones underground. The upper surface of the saturated zone is called the water table. Groundwater is held in the pores and fractures of underground materials like sand, gravel and other rock, these rock materials are called aquifers. Groundwater can either flow naturally out of rock materials or can be pumped out [cite usgs]. Groundwater supplies wells and aquifers for private, agricultural, and public use and is used by more than a third of the world's population everyday for their drinking water. Globally there is 22.6 million cubic kilometers of groundwater available and only .35 million of that is renewable.

Groundwater is a non-renewable resource

Groundwater is considered to be a non-renewable resource because less than six percent of the water around the world is replenished and renewed on a human timescale of 50 years. People are already using non-renewable water that is thousands of years old, in areas like Egypt they are using water that may have been renewed a million years ago which is not renewable on human timescales. Of the groundwater used for agriculture 16 to 33% is non-renewable. It is estimated that since the 1960s groundwater extraction has more than doubled, which has increased groundwater depletion. Due to this increase in depletion, in some of the most depleted areas use of groundwater for irrigation has become impossible or cost prohibitive.

Environmental Impacts

Overusing groundwater, old or young can lower subsurface water levels and dry up streams, which could have a huge effect on ecosystems on the surface. When the most easily recoverable fresh groundwater is removed this leaves a residual with inferior water quality. This is in part from induced leakage from the land surface, confining layers or adjacent aquifers that contain saline or contaminated water. Worldwide the magnitude of groundwater depletion from storage may be so large as to constitute a measurable contributor to sea-level rise.

Mitigation

Currently societies respond to water-resource depletion by shifting management objectives from location and developing new supplies to augmenting conserving and reallocation of existing supplies. There are two different perspectives to ground water depletion, the first is that depletion is considered literally and simply as a reduction in the volume of water in the saturated zone, regardless of water quality considerations. A second perspective views depletion as a reduction in the usable volume of fresh ground water in storage.

Augmenting supplies can mean improving water quality or increasing water quantity. Depletion due to quality considerations can be overcome by treatment, where as large volumetric depletion can only be alleviated by decreasing discharge or increasing recharge. Artificial recharge of storm flow and treated municipal wastewater, has successfully reversed groundwater declines. In the future improbed infiltration and recharge technologies will be more widely used to maximize the capture of runoff and treated wastewater.

Conserving groundwater by reducing pumpage can be accomplised through administrative, legislative, or management controls, including economic incentives to reduce demand. it is important to target reductions that actually save water.

Reallocating water resources will play an increasingly important role in groundwater management. Water markets, leasing, trading, and other mechanisms can move limited water from lower to higher productivity sectors, as an alternative to further depletion.