User:Ruite006/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Fen

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the Wikipedia article on fens because I think I might want to improve this page. When looking at all the other types of wetlands (swamps, marshes, and bogs), I see much better-developed pages. The article on fens could probably be improved at least to their level. It matters because fens are a rather rare and important habitat for a diverse ecological community. As one type of peatland, they also play an important role as a carbon sink. I think the article could definitely use some work. The header is enormous and that's pretty much the entire article. With some smoothing out, I think the article could turn out nice, especially if the article on wetlands was updated to adequately explain the differences between the different types of wetlands.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The lead section on the article is enormous. There is a lot of information in there that could be recycled into well-defined sections in the actual body of the article. As the article hardly has any sections, there isn't a summary that hits on the article's major points. The whole lead is information that isn't present in the article. As a whole, it needs reworking.

Content

The content in this article is not terrible. From what I know about fens, there is a good bit missing from the article, but some of the basics are present with citations. It could benefit from an update containing some newer reviews on the chemistry/flora of fens or how climate change/anthropogenic activity is impacting them. I have to question the "In literature" section, as it seems like an odd section for the article, but I would probably leave the decision to expand or delete it up to someone with more knowledge about Wikipedia than I do. Overall, the content needs work.

Tone and balance

Tone and balance are just fine. The article makes no unscientific claims meant to persuade. While there are some sentences lacking citations, these don't make an attempt to sway the reader in any way.

Sources and references

First, the sources section is a complete mess. There are actually two sections: a References section and a Bibliography section, both of which contain references. Many of the references in the References section are actually just links that link to a reference in the Bibliography section. This part of the page needs a lot of love. The citations present in the References section look improperly formatted. It also looks like the newest reference is from 2010--time for an update. Most of the facts in the article do have a citation. It looks like what links there are do work with one exception. I can't imagine there aren't some better sources than the ones they cite; for example, the University of Michigan has some great articles on wetlands, and those aren't cited. There's a lot left to be desired here, but with some cleaning up and updating, I think it shouldn't be too hard to consolidate the two citation sections into one clean References section.

Organization and writing quality

The article is not organized. There are two sections besides the header: literature and vegetation. There should at least be sections on formation, properties, and effect of humans. The spelling and grammar are good. The article is not terribly easy to read. The header paragraphs don't follow any particular order or themes as far as I can tell. That's OK though, as much of the information in the header will have to be divided up into the content sections of the page.

Images and media

There are images that improve the reading experience, but each image has problems. The first image is a complicated but potentially helpful diagram explaining different types of fens. The image just doesn't work in the article as it is, as there isn't any explanation of the different areas in which fens are found. The image also contains a small summary of what fens are in the picture, which I'm not sure is terribly appropriate. There is no caption on the image. There are also two good pictures of fens, but the captions could use some work. There are four great pictures in the Gallery section, but those captions could also use some work. It looks like all of the photos follow copyright rules.

Talk page discussion

All of the conversations on the talk page are old, but I think they are valuable discussions. Because fens generally build up peat over time and become bogs, there is valuable discussion about how this fact should be represented and on which page this process belongs. Some newer discussion on the current state of the article would be nice, though. The article is rated Start class by the Limnology and Oceanography WikiProject, and it is of mid-importance.

Overall impressions

I think this could become an informative article with some TLC. While the organization is awful and the page hasn't been improved in ages, there is some good information in the scramble of a header. By pulling out some of the points made there, I think clear sections could be made and then expanded upon to result in a basic yet solid article that would give any reader at least a good idea about what fens are all about.