User:Megfennelly/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Brown recluse spider

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article ultimately because I find spiders creepy but interesting, and I know some species can be somewhat complex. With Brown Recluses being around in the area that I used live in, I also thought it seemed important to know more about them.

Evaluate the article
The lead of this article starts out strong with a sentence explaining to you what a brown recluse spider is, and then trails off into a paragraph that isn't too lengthy or bulky, but has a good amount of information to fill the reader in on more of this spider (noticeable identifiers, nicknames, color and size). Despite the concise and informative two paragraphs of the lead, it doesn't include a debriefing of the major points that they go on to discuss within the article. The overall content of this article is relevant, easy to digest, and up-to-date (it was last updated 8/18/22). However, contrary to the rest of the paragraphs, the "Bite" paragraph of this article is written with very scientific terms that are practically impossible to fully understand unless you have a history with arachnid terminology or are an expert on spiders. The rest of the content is written with a professional feel, but is still written simply enough for a naive reader to understand. The article is written in an entirely neutral tone, with the author's only goal seemingly being to deliver facts about the brown recluse. The topic within the article of bites and bite related information have a bit more information in them than other main topics (ex. habitat, life cycle), but this could be expected, as the bite of a brown recluse is one of the most widely known aspects of the species. This competitive amount of information compared to the other sections didn't feel like the author trying to push anything onto the readers, but more as a well researched explanation to a large concern surrounding the spider. The facts presented in this article are definitely backed up by reliable resources, with the sources section coming in at 57 articles. Each fact presented throughout the writing has a hyper link to one of the sources, which are all related to the topic of the brown recluse or the effects/treatment caused by a bite. There is an array of authors and publish dates for these sources, but they are up to date with the most current having a publish date of 8/15/22. As previously mentioned, the article is well written and easy to read despite the one paragraph labeled "bite" that is written in technical terms. There are headers breaking up the different sections and none of the information in those sections bleed into another very much if at all. There are four photos showcasing a brown recluse to allow the reader to visualize what they're reading about. All of these images give credit to the photographer and are public domain, which adheres to Wikipedia's copyright regulations. The photos are clear, relative to the article, well captioned, but are unfortunately all congregated at the top. This article is apart of the WikiProject "Spiders", where it is ranked number 1 with an importance of "high," and a considerable amount of daily views (4,920 average). This being said, this article is written very well overall. It is concise, clear, continuously updated, and informative. The author writes in a neutral tone, not assuming any facts or pushing a certain viewpoint onto the reader. If I were to make any suggestions to help the article feel more complete, I would suggest adding more information about the covered topics (briefly) in the lead, maybe branching off to more aspects in the life cycle and habitat paragraphs, dispersing the images all throughout the article, and last but not least, simplifying the "bite" paragraph to make it easy to understand for uninformed readers. Besides these edits, this article feels well-developed and delivers an abundance of reliable information to those interested in the brown recluse.