User:OpabiniaEnjoyer/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Gene duplication

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 this from the C articles list on the Evolutionary Biology project-- I've studied the evolution of duplicated genes for two years and feel qualified to take on this page! Gene duplication is an important driver of evolutionary change and one of the main ways new genetic material can be added. Overall, this article seemed pretty good on the surface, but was a lot of disconnected information that didn't play into each other. It needed a rewrite to make it coherent.

Evaluate the article
While the overall content of the article was well written and contained the information I'd expect to see there, but I felt that the sections were choppy and didn't build upon each other. You could really tell this article was built up in small pieces by many Wikipedians who each had their own, very niche area of expertise. There were a few chunks of the article that I didn't feel had particular relevance, but were their own section anyways.This includes the 3 sentence "Nomenclature" section that really just says dup is the abbreviation for duplication in a specific naming convention. This was accompanied by a confusing figure of the human karyotype that I really don't think had relevance to the article. Other than that, I felt that the figures were very useful to understanding and feel they're a high point of the article.

The lead section was good, but short. It has a topic sentence and good definition of gene duplication, but fails to lay out the sections of the article past mechanisms of duplication. I think this is in part due to my above critique about it being from multiple Wikipedians adding small chunks-- they added their expertise, but didn't think to update the lead section.

One thing I noticed about the references is that many were old-- from the 60s to the 80s, before DNA could even be sequenced. Even the newer peer reviewed articles were from the mid 2000s, which in the field of genetics is ancient! I'd like to see someone go through and replace these sources with newer review articles if possible. Otherwise, the sources that are up to date seem good.

To improve this article, I'd like to see it condensed down for conciseness and clarity-- there are areas that would serve better as their own page rather than throwing lots of unrelated jargon into the page. An updated lead section would also do wonders!