User:Smith4e4/sandbox

Page Revision and Editing Project for Intermediate Composition
Looks great, Evan.

Progress:
I have chosen to work on Atmospheric electricity, which is the page that I evaluated for the first assignment of this unit.

10/15/2018 Update: Completed plan of action write up in sandbox section below.

10/17/2018 Update: Added 3 citations for class

10/26/2018 Update: Added blog post #3; Specific details of planned changes.

10/30/2018 Update: Created page for my edited article draft

Exact Changes Plan for 10/26/2018
I plan to begin my edits (after posting on the talk page) by applying the citations I've gathered regarding the Schumann Resonance section as well as some of the other examples, and will also add some as part of the process of editing the lead and description sections as well. I will simultaneously fact check some numbers which were discussed and agreed upon as strange in the distant past on the talk page, and add citations for the corrected versions. I will also add a historical use section, either incorporating this into or replacing/rewriting the history section to largely be more about this specific page. I want to use this section to make it clear that this is a term that is best used in a loose sense, since it is used differently in many contexts and disciplines of science and is rather antiquated. The lead should also state the limited scientific usefulness of this term due to its antiquated status. One of the major problems with this page is that it is full of uncited and potentially unreliable information. It is a conglomerate of writings by people who are talking about different things, and I aim to rewrite or at least reorganize quite a bit of it to fit standards and formats I recognize on other articles about scientific terms, and acknowledge blatantly to the reader that it is a term useful mostly to laypeople at this time. This page has great potential to be useful for people to find a variety of interesting phenomena and feed their interest in many different areas of science, without the page being reduced to nothing but a list of various examples.

3 Citations for 10/17/2018
Schumann Resonance information (source found on its wiki page) NASA Article that could be used in the thunderstorm section  Journal article from UC library website that could be used to verify some numerical values

Plan of Action for 10/15/2018
My evaluation of the article from the earlier assignment still stands, with the addition of the fact that the article is listed under the Science, Earth Science categories as vital importance, and is mid importance in the Physics and Meteorology projects, respectively, and is a C-class by both of their standards. I was unable to find a to do list on the physics project page, and their general task directive seems to just encourage people to improve pages like this. It was also relevant to our class discussion in that the page specifically mentions the problem of articles becoming too obtuse, and so they welcome experts, knowledgeable amateurs, and also laypeople in order to ensure that articles are accurate, appropriately detailed, and accessible to a wide audience. There is also a statement about taking into account who may be interested in an article, and writing it for that audience as well, which is something we hadn't considered very much in class. The view on the physics project page seems to be that some pages are of interest to anyone looking up physics related information, and so should be written with at least some sections and general explanations that are accessible to groups such as elementary school students, whereas some advanced topics can be written in a more advanced style under the expectation that only people of at least a graduate student level of prior knowledge will need to read them. There doesn't seem to be a formal categorization, however, and so I would guess that this is discussed for each article and decided democratically over time by the authors. Regarding the talk page of my article, Atmospheric electricity, As I mentioned in my original evaluation, there hasn't been any human activity on the talk page since 2015, however there are still signs in the article of some of the issues which were discussed way back then. It could use rewrites to several sections, as well as general fact checking, and a style update to make it feel more like a science article. The scope of some sections of it should also be reviewed, and the overall purpose and scope of the article should be discussed and taken into consideration when reconsidering a lot of the format. For the first part of my plan of action, I will fact check several statements that seem outdated or odd, and also look for and add citations to some of the areas I mentioned were lacking them in my original evaluation of the article. I will then post about these edits on the talk page, and hopefully reignite some discussion so that I can bring up some larger reformatting issues before I make any large changes.

Article Evaluation:
I am evaluating Atmospheric electricity

I first noticed that the lead for this article does contain citations, which is something I noticed a lot of C class articles on the physics wiki project list were lacking, however it seems to ramble and go off topic a bit. The second paragraph talks about thunderstorms, which are a notably familiar example of the atmospheric electricity, but are only one small part of the article as a whole, so I don't think such detailed information about them specifically should take up a third of the text in the lead, especially not when it's a whole paragraph. The History section of this article has a lot of information included in it, which is good, but there are no citations until 5 paragraphs in, and few after that. It may also be a bit too detailed and wordy. The first paragraph of the description section is then completely uncited, is written with a strange tone, and contains run on sentences. It is written almost like it could be a lead for an article, however it delves too far into the explanation to be well suited for this role either. There are also some examples of phenomena which lack citations, such as the part about Schumann resonance in the Earth-Ionosphere cavity section.

After looking at the talk page, it is a bit clearer that there is potentially a mix of historical information which is stated in an antiquated fashion (although much has been removed since the discussions about it), as well as some general confusion on what the scope of the article should be. The talk page doesn't seem to have stayed very active past 2015, with the exceptions of bots.

I was surprised to not see much discussion about the lack of citations, I may simply post that I'm looking to add citations to the Schumann resonance part and some other places.