User:Mnielander2022/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I have chosen to evaluate the article on Embryonic Diapause.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Embryonic diapause is a reproductive strategy utilized by many organisms, about which scientists still know surprisingly little, but great strides have been made in the past several years. There is speculation even that human embryos may undergo facultative diapause in the presence of stressing factors, and recent research has demonstrated a potential embryonic diapause-like adaptation by cancer cells in response to anti-cancer treatments , meaning this topic could very soon become much more public. The current state of the article is non-ideal; the article itself contains very little information, and is relatively out-dated, with some of its most recent references having been retrieved in 2008. Even within the article's talk page, there is discussion of some of the article's shortcomings, including the acknowledgement that embryonic diapause occurs in fish as well as mammals. I have chosen to evaluate this article because of the potential that exists to improve it.

Evaluate the article
The article starts quite strong, in that the lead section contains a majority of the information provided for the topic-- as it progresses into the more detailed sections, very little information is given. This is evident not only in reading the article, but also quite easily recognizable by the length of the sections. This being said, part of the reason the lead section may be a bit larger is because the definition of the article topic is not very concisely given. In order to really understand what exactly is being discussed, the reader has to get through the first three sentences of the lead section, which is a majority of the section's contents. From there, the article touches upon a point which is not any further explored, and with some basic examples of organisms which employ this technique, the lead section is completed without any introduction of the next few sections.

With regards to content: the article is very outdated, and not very thorough. For the very basic concepts introduced, they are defined, and very little further information is provided. Upon further investigation of the resources cited within the article, even at the time of writing, there are severe gaps in knowledge between the resources available and the information expressed in the article. The author focused exclusively on mammalian embryonic development and made no mention of other organisms affected, despite discussion within the cited sources that non-mammalian species, extending even to plants and insects, are capable of undergoing embryonic diapause. As previously stated, also, the article's lead section makes mention of there being well-known molecular regulation mechanisms for the initiation of embryonic diapause, however, there is no development or explanation of this concept, nor even citations to support this claim. The inclusion of these details and a section on initiation mechanisms could significantly strengthen the article.

One strength of the authors' work is the clear effort made to make the information provided accessible to the community without jargon barriers. Throughout the article, many terms have been made into hyperlinks to other Wiki-articles, with brief descriptions available by hovering over the term so as to not interrupt the reader's flow by having to pause to research unfamiliar vocabulary. This practice does appear a little overzealous, though, evident by the double linking of the word "reproduction" to its corresponding Wiki-page.

Aside from these resources, the journals and sites used by the authors for the content of the article could be improved. With a quick search of the key-term "Embryonic Diapause" into Pubmed, a common resource for finding scientific literature, I was able to locate over 400 studies produced within the past 10 years that could be used to update the content of the article, including nearly 50 reviews and systematic reviews on the topic. These could be used to not only update the information presented, but also potentially replace some of the less reliable web-sources used previously.

Overall, the article appears to simply be severely under-developed, with very minimal information offered for readers. This may in part be due to the close relationship between embryonic and general diapause, which has its own Wiki article, but still very little is done to recognize or distinguish between the two if that is the issue at hand. In fact, the less specific diapause page is not even referenced within the Embryonic Diapause article. The structure presented in the sections that have already been laid out is very good, but there is much more to present in order to offer readers a more secure understanding of the concept itself, as well as the molecular biology behind it. In developing these new sections, pictures and figures may also be useful.