User:MrJockin/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Bacteria

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose the massive bacteria article because it was one of the domains of life, and in microbial ecology we will talk immensely about bacteria. My first impression of this article was that it's size was daunting, and that there must be troves of information available.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section to this article is very detailed. They traded conciseness for maximum information. The lead section is basically a long description of bacteria in general, starting from bacteria is very small to how bacteria differentiates from eukaryota and archaea. This structure for a lead section would help someone who is trying to learn in-depth about the topic, but to the untrained and unprofessional eye, a lot of this information could be overwhelming. The lead section is then followed by a table of contents with hyperlinks that would send you to a later portion of the article. The content of their article was rather straight forward. With a topic like bacteria, there is little room left for bias or underrepresented information or data. From my limited knowledge on bacteria, the article covers everything I would think to be important. All of the information is phrased in a matter-of-fact way, leaving the reader to not have to decide between things. This neutral tone is carried out through the entire article, not betraying any biases. The article is very well written, I imagine it has been seen by a lot of eyes and editors. There are images throughout the article of different related things with informative captions to help the reader understand more. In the talk section, there was minimal recent dialogue. There were a few recent edits and a few edits that were revised by others because the information was false.

This article is a Wikipedia features article, so it has been identified as one of the best available on the website. It is also listed as a level 3 vital article in the science section. This along with the amount of people that have seen and edited it, is why this article is so well done. The articles strengths are the concrete trustworthy evidence it brings, whereas it's weakness is the long-winded introduction section.