User:PidgeonTrainer/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Blastulation

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 have chosen to evaluate this article because it is about blastulation, which the course is currently covering. Beyond its relevance to the class I am taking, this article is important because of Wikipedia's status as one of the largest websites in the world. If anyone looks up what blastulation is, the article will be one of the first results. Wikipedians must ensure that people are receiving clear and correct information. My first impression of the article was mixed. I appreciate how detailed and precise the information was, but the level of detail was a double-edged sword. The article contains a lot of jargon that the average reader would not be able to quickly understand.

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 article on blastulation is useful, accurate, and well-sourced. Its first sentence accomplished the goal of a topic sentence: it defined the term "blastulation," and in doing so, it established blastulation as the topic. In the next few sentences, the writer also defined blastula to avoid any confusion from readers. In the lead section, there are no clear descriptions of what sections will follow the first, but the topics are briefly introduced. The lead section follows a non-traditional format. Instead of being a brief section that introduces the topic and subtopics, it mostly consists of scientific explanations. Therefore, it does not contain information that is not found in the article because I consider it part of the article itself.

The content is where this article truly shines. All of the content presented by the writers is relevant, including the section about the clinical implications of blastulation, which some people may consider to be unnecessary. The content is mostly up to date. I checked the dates on the sources, and a few of them are from the '70s and '80s. However, most of the sources are from the 2000s, and the information is still correct. I cannot think of anything the writers missed and any information one may consider extra is sectioned off.

The writers did a good job of maintaining a neutral tone. When reading the article, I never felt like I was being convinced to take a side in anything. The article dedicates a lot of space to the clinical implications of blastulation, but the facts presented in that section were backed up with high-quality sources.

The facts presented in the article were backed up by strong sources. Almost every sentence has a footnote that leads to a source. Every link I clicked worked and led to a high-quality source. I did not check every source. However, the ones I checked seemed reliable and were posted in respectable databases. Some of the sources are from the '70s and '80s. It may be useful to the article for the writers to find newer sources to replace the older ones.

The article was organized well, but its writing contains my biggest problem with it: the writers used language that most people would not readily understand. The writers give very brief definitions for the terms, but they should be a bit more fleshed out. There were only two images, but they were not intrusive and enhanced the article. They were both cited and captioned, but you had to click on them to see the citations. Everything else about the organization and writing was done correctly. The sections were clearly defined, and I found no spelling errors.

The talk page mostly had supportive comments explaining how the writers should fix issues with the article. There was even a peer review in which the author offered constructive criticism. One of the author's points was that the writers should make the article more accessible to laypeople. There was a comment that just insulted the writers and offered no advice. Following some of the critical comments, one of the writers created a post that explained that they were updating the article and fixing some of its issues. The article is rated start-class and is of mid-importance to the animal anatomy WikiProject and low-importance to the biology WikiProject.

Overall, I think that this article is excellent, and in its current state, it has very few flaws. The only big problem I can find with it is that it is still somewhat inaccessible to laypeople. This problem is easy to fix; all the writers have to do is spend a bit more time explaining the secondary information needed to understand the topic. Another thing the writers could do to improve the article is to create a true lead section. They could add a short block of text that introduces the topic and explains what will be in the future sections. Finally, they could update the article by adding newer sources to replace the ones from the '70s. The article's strengths are its conciseness and the quality of its information. In its current state, I consider the article to be fully complete.