User:Pipermfrench/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sea star wasting disease

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen to evaluate this article because it is related to my course material for REM 211: Intro to Applied Ecology. This article is important in creating awareness to Sea star wasting disease, a disease that effects sea stars in the waters close to where I live. My preliminary impression is that the article is relatively short and concise, but provides most of the information that someone would want to know about sea star wasting disease. Although, I noticed that not every claim was cited.

Evaluate the article
Lead:

The introductory sentence in the article concisely describes the article's topic. However, the lead section does not include a brief description of the articles major sections. It does however include a list of the contents. All information discussed in the lead is mentioned again at some point in the article. The lead is nice and concise.

Content:

The content within the article is relevant to the article topic. As far as I could tell, the article is up to date, and recent revisions have been made. No content is clearly missing from the article, although some points could have been expanded further. For example, more could have been said about how the declines in some sea star populations due to the disease has effected other species and their ecosystems. More also could have been mentioned about where the population size is at today for the most affected species of sea stars. The article does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps.

Tone and Balance:

The tone of the article is neutral. There is no sense of bias or over/under-represented viewpoints. The article does not attempt to be persuasive.

Sources and References:

Not all facts stated in this article are backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. Although, there seems to be quite a few sources included in the article. The most recent source identified in the citations was from 2018. Therefore, there may be more up-to-date sources available now on the subject. The sources don't seem to be representative of an extremely diverse set of authors. Some of the sources used are news articles, and therefore should be replaced with peer-reviewed articles. Additionally, some of the links did not work, and at least one of the sources could not be accessed publicly.

Organization and Writing Quality:

The article is relatively well written and concise, although there were a few grammatical errors. The article is broken down into sections that make sense and reflect the topic's main points.

Images and Media:

There is only one image used in the entire article, but the image seems well captioned and appears to adhere to copyright regulations. The placement of the image seems fine, however it is quite small on the page and could have been made bigger. It would also have been good to include more photos reflecting other species of sea star suffering from this disease.

Talk Page Discussion:

There is not an extensive talk page history for this article. It seems that "sea star wasting syndrome" wikipedia paged has been merged into this one. One short conversation on the talk page discusses the merger proposal and a couple people support it. There is another discussion that mentions the "treatment section needs to be time-neutral". The article is rated as C-class, and is included in a number of projects: WikiProject Marine Life, WikiProject Oceans, WikiProject Ecoregions, WikiProject Viruses, and WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography. A fact from this page also appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page. This article covers a bit more of the background information to the disease and different plagues compared to our discussion in class about it. However, our discussion in class included more scientific explanations of the population decline than the article did.

Overall Impressions:

Overall, I think this article did a good job at providing more background information on this disease and explaining what it does to the sea stars and how it might be cured. A strength of the article is that it is fairly concise and doesn't repeat the same information multiple times. However, I think this article could be improved by diving a bit deeper. For example, it might have been interested to include a section on any cultural impacts the decline in the sea stars might be having, if any. Also, the article should have avoided using news articles as sources, and should have also cited every fact that it presented. I wouldn't define this article as "well-developed", but it is satisfactory and provides some good information. Making the recommended adjustments (especially to sources) would be helpful.