User:SootySalamander/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Octocorallia)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article as I wanted to discuss an article in my field. The field of coral biology is heavily studied at this point, so I expected a good quality article to evaluate.

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.)

Lead Section

The lead section is a good summary of what the article will discuss. It is concise, however it has no description of the major sections due to how short the article is.

Content

The content, while lacking, seems to be of good quality. This topic has nothing to do with equitable access, as this isn't a historically underrepresented or marginalized topic. The information is detailed, up to date and topical, however the article size is rather small.

Tone and Balence

The tone of this article is unremarkably neutral. The topic is uncontroversial due to it's age, and there didn't appear to be a reference to any knowledge-front level arguments in the field.

Sources and References

The quality of these sources seem to be of good stock. All of the resources came from reputable scientific journals, with a diverse series of authors. The articles are only a decade old at the most, with mostly more recent sources.

Organization and writing quality

The article is well written, a good mix of more formal syntax while remaining readable for the vast majority of the public. The page is organized into the two main subheadings, and doesn't appear to have glaring grammatical mistakes.

Images and Media

The images do not violate the copyright rules for wikipedia.They are captioned, relevant to the topic and pleasing additions to the text.

Talk page discussion

The talk page was rather mellow, only two messages total were in the discussion for minor edits. The page is under two wikiprojects, Animals and Marine Life, but both are classified as low-importance. I was surprised at the lack of messages, I assume there would be more discussion for creating an article.

Overall Impressions

I would say that this article is in a good place. The article is well written, it summarizes the necessary information without getting to into the weeds on any subject. While the content itself is small, this is a article on a whole class of species, with more than 8,000 members. It's hard to generalize for that large a group. It also well links to articles lower in the chain of scientific definition for relevant species. If anything, in the future I'd suggest a brief summary of the different orders below Octocorallia on this page, to better inform researchers of the whole classes characteristics, without having to navigate around wikipedia links so much.