User:Saharae/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Ghost Bat

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article by hitting the "random article" button on the side bar until an interesting article came up. I think bats are very cool and this article caught my eye because of the pictures and illustrations.

Evaluate the article
I thought this article was incredibly well researched and well cited. It's of interest to 3 wikiprojects, however it is rated with low-importance. Beginning with the intro, it did a good job setting up the article, however I did notice that nothing was cited other than internal Wikipedia articles. That threw me off, however everything was later cited in the body of the article so it didn't take away from the overall credibility of the article. The illustrations that were found throughout the article were definitely helpful and I thought they added to the credibility.

The actual content of the article went over my head as it was very heavy on the science, and heavy on the latin. I do not think this is a huge negative to the article as it wasn't written for me and I'm sure that if I was looking for this article it would make more sense to me. Regardless, I think a couple sections that are geared more towards a novice in the realm of bats would be advantageous as it wouldn't scare off the readers who are dipping their toes in.

The tone of the article was very neutral as most of it was science and fact stating. I did not get the impression that the writer of the article was opinionated on the subject, only that they were passionate about bats which I think is a positive.

To recap, the biggest shortcoming I found was the readability of the article, and the lack of citations and true introduction to the article. To fix this I believe a longer and more plain spoken introduction with more citations outside of Wikipedia would open the article up to more traffic and be a better source of information for those who may not know anything about Ghost Bats or bats in general.

Overall I was impressed by the article and I thought it was a credible source of information.