User:Pikake Lei/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
History of biology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am currently majoring in Biology, and I have some knowledge of its history and subfields. I thought it would be interesting to see how such a broad topic can be concisely and accurately written about. The history of biology matters because it provides insight into the knowledge previously discovered through thousands of years of research, and it informs what kind of research can be done now. I thought the article was very thorough and described concisely the major developments and scientists that contributed to our knowledge of the natural world.

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 gave a concise overview of the major topics discussed in the article. The introductory sentence presented the topic of the article.

Content in the article is relevant to the topic and up to date (current discoveries could be added to the 21st century section, though). As far as I can tell, there is no missing content (from the sections previous to the 21st century) or content that doesn't belong. There are also numerous links to other Wikipedia articles that further discuss concepts/topics/people introduced in this article. I noticed that sections on the 19th and 20th century were considerably longer that the previous sections (and the final 21st century section). However, the length was appropriate; a lot of discoveries were made in the 19th and 20th century, so it makes sense that these sections would be the longest.

Tone and Balance of the article is neutral. The authors are not trying to persuade anyone, and there is no bias.

Sources and References were thorough; there were citations for information introduced in the article. However, the 21st century section did not have any citations. There were a few quotes that I noticed, which was interesting, because I remember from one of the training modules that Wikipedia prefers that we don't use citations. The quotes were cited. From what I can tell, the sources are not current to today; however, they do reflect the current information available when the article was first written. A lot of the sources come from the late 20th century and early 2000s, and the article was initially written in the early 2000s. The external links work.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is easy to read and concise. As far as I can tell, there are no grammatical and spelling errors. The article's sections were presented in a logical manner, tracing the main discoveries in biology in a chronological order through the different periods in history.

Images and Media: Many images were used in this article. They were relevant to the information presented in their corresponding sections, and they contained informative captions. I checked the first three photos in the article; they are in the public domain.

Talk Page Discussion: The contributors were debating the state of biological knowledge during Medieval times, which seemed to cause some fighting. The article received ratings of level-4 vital article, featured article, and FA-Class.

Overall Impressions: The article is very well developed; it gave a very good overview of the progression of biological knowledge and development through history. It was also easy to follow along, and it didn't go into complicated detail about the specifics of each scientist/discovery/etc.. In order to improve the article, citations should be added to the 21st century section. Also, more information can be added to the 21st century section, such as new discoveries and scientists.