User:Smm323/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cerutti Mastodon site

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I just reread most of the main papers on the subject for my discussion so I figured I'd have a good amount of background knowledge to evaluate the article. Plus, it's a controversial site and I wanted to see what the talk page was like.

Evaluate the article
The lead section is concise and in general well written. It does not mention the criticism of the site which is actually the longest section of the article. In terms of content, the article does a decent job presenting the context of the site and all of the content relates to the article. It's all up to date (from what I can find), and I don't see any major gaps in the article. It does address an equity gap as it deals with the peopling of the Americas, especially Pre-Clovis sites, which are underrepresented. The main issue with the article is the balance of point of views. The findings section of the article doesn't go into much detail about why the original research team believes the site to be archaeological in nature. The use of experimental archaeology to recreate the breaks with similar hammerstones is completely left out. It also barely includes the research teams responses to criticism, only including the comments of Thomas Deméré, instead of referencing the follow up papers. While it is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I don't think the article provides a decidedly neutral view, instead hanging on the skepticism that the site inspires. Again, not a bad view to have generally, but in terms of a Wikipedia article I don't think it is balanced. Heading into the sources, the biggest sources for criticism are in fact news articles and other pop science publications. (Which I find odd to use because even the news stories cite the original replies to Holen et al.) Some of the ones at the beginning of the criticism section are outdated, with one as old as 1979. There are certainly better and more current sources available. Now the writing and organization of the article is good, clear, and informative. I didn't see any major grammatical errors and it all seemed to make sense. The two images on the article follow Wikipedia's guidelines and are laid out in a fine way.

In terms of the talk page, there was a long discussion on the exact location of the site that was resolved. It also addresses not using the critical reply papers, but from what I can tell that has not been changed since 2018. There was also at one time a source that was entirely a self published, unreviewed, article from what appears just to be a random guy talking about maybe a massive monkey smashed it. Someone asked about what does hominins mean, which someone explained quite nicely. There is a debate about adding the White Sands date into the article, but that was rejected as it wasn't entirely relevant to the article. The article is rated as a starter-article belonging to the Paleontology, Archaeology, and San Diego WikiProjects. It is rated as low-importance in both Paleontology and Archaeology but as mid-importance in the San Diego project. (Which I don't entirely agree with, but not my call.) Since we've only read the textbook about this and the section was brief, this article differs because it does go a bit more in depth on the topic than we did in our reading.

My overall impressions are that this article needs help being more balanced and actually going into the reasons behind the claims of the original research team. It needs better and more current sources in the criticism section. I think the article is underdeveloped for how important this site could potentially be if more evidence comes to light, but it's not bad for where it sits right now, just from how much there actually is out there about the site. I think to improve the article the findings section needs to be expanded to include the researchers reasoning behind their claims, as I think the reasoning behind the original claims is underrepresented in the article, which could lead to bias with how intensive the criticism section is.