User:Schu4379/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Soil ecology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Soil ecology is an important field that affects agriculture and ecosystem and water health. The importance of this field should be reflected in a well-written and current Wikipedia article, and while this article has some strengths there is also room for considerable improvement.

Evaluate the article
The lead section is provides a good overview of soil ecology, but does not reflect the content of the article. The lead section implies that the article will detail topics important to soil ecology including nutrient cycling, pore structure, the spread of pathogens, and biodiversity, though biodiversity is the only topic covered in detail in the main section. This article could be improved by including sections describing these other topics in soil.

The content of this article needs to be improved and sections should be renamed to more accurately describe their content. The section "Features of the ecosystem" has sentences with unnecessarily complex structure that should be rewritten for clarity. The "Soil macrofauna" section discusses both macrofauna and microfauna, and much of the information would be better suited in a section on biodiversity. The "Microfauna" section does not discuss soil microfauna and instead identifies technology used to identify microbes. The "Soil food web section" similarly should be rewritten to more accurately describe the energy transfer between soil organisms, and the current content of this section is better suited for a section on ecosystem services. The entire article, especially the "Research" section, should be updated to reflect current scientific findings.

The article tone is appropriate. Sources are appropriately used to support claims and links work.

The Macrofauna image is helpful with a well-written caption. This image would be more appropriate in the "Soil food web" section. Additional images of examples of soil macrofauna and microfauna would be an interesting but not entirely necessary addition to the page.

This article is part of the WikiProjects Soil and Ecology, and is ranked as High Importance in both of these projects. The article is considered to be Start class by these WikiProject Ecology, so considerable improvement is still needed. On the Talk page, a similar assessment was made by a reviewer that this article needs significant editing to improve prose, content, and balance. Other than that comment, there has been little dialogue about how to improve this article.

Overall, this article is a start but needs considerable development to more completely describe the current understanding of the field of soil ecology.