User:Sethmast/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Environmental science

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because environmental sciences are something that really interests me and is something that I take into consideration throughout my daily life. I enjoyed reading this article but it was a hard read as in the verbiage used was hard for me to understand at times. Through looking at the sources as well as the information being given by the article, I was able to learn more about the basics of environmental sciences and what disciplines connect to this subject.

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 of this article does define what environmental science is and the disciplines that are connected within this subject. There is a definition of environmental science and a good amount of background information that is used to prep the reader for more in-depth information on the subject. All of the information that is covered in the article is listed briefly in the lead section as well as there is no use of information in the lead section that is not covered throughout the article. The lead section is a little lengthy as it could have been shortened briefly by not giving as much information about each topic. Instead the article lists information twice, both in the lead section and in the content section of the article. The content used within the article is relevant to the topic. There is a lot of information that can be covered within this topic and this article does not cover all of it, but this is a good generalization to the subject being focused on. This article does not seem to represent any historically underrepresented information, but it does include a lot of information related to the topic that can be found in one place instead of searching for different articles for a lot of the information. The article is written from a neutral standpoint and this is obvious because the article is composed primarily of factual statements that can not be contradicted with. No subject seems to be overrepresented within the article and there does not seem to be any fridge viewpoints represented either. There is also no persuasion being used within the article as a lot of the information is again factual statements. If there is any bias in this article it is the specific information the author uses about each time period being covered. There are plenty of sources used to further the explanation of information in the article, and all information gathered from other sources are connected with a link to the source being used. There are 17 sources being used and each source is represented in the article. The sources being used are full of rich information on the topics and each of them seem to be reliable. There could have been better use of 2 of the sources in my opinion because there was more information in the source than what was presented in the wiki article. There also seems to be a couple of facts and information that is not represented with a source which needs to be updated. The talk page discusses this information that needs to be cited as well as a couple more critiques the author could make to make this information more understandable and connecting to the topic. There is also a critique on the template being used for this article which I would have to agree with. This topic was not particularly something we have discussed in class but it is something that I will take into my future classroom. This is a topic that I believe needs to be covered for students to understand the severity of the situation our environment is in. The article's strengths are the sources being used. Each source that is used is a reliable source that brings rich information into the topic, but the weakness of this article is that some of the information being used is not represented with a source, and the delivery of the information could be stronger. I would say that this article is close to being complete but it could use an update on the template and other information that was not correctly represented.