User:SophiaGibbons/Evaluate an Article

Article Evaluation

 * Animal sexual behaviour: Animal sexual behaviour


 * There are numerous aspects to animal behaviour and as I was deciding on an article I seen this one, as I started reading I realized how truly complex it is. The amount of content within animal sexual behaviour alone is substantial and interesting, the fact that I am also learning about it in class as well made it more fascinating for me and I wanted to learn more.

Lead
The lead within this article definitely includes a large amount of information but I found that it basically just repeats what the content is going to be throughout the article and what will be mentioned further on. It doesn't include a concise description of animal sexual behaviour rather it just begins to explain the different aspects of it instead. So while not having a exact description it clearly displays what major topics will be mentioned. Everything that the lead acknowledges is an important aspect of animal sexual behaviour therefore in that aspect I believe that it is concise but it could have also used an ounce more of description rather than just stating facts.

Content
The content throughout this article is extremely relevant to the topic, as I was reading I felt as though I was just learning more and more about animal sexual behaviour. Each subtopic that is mentioned has its own subtopic explaining itself even more, for example after mating systems was defined it then went into analyzing five separate types of mating systems. The only part of the content that I found slightly out of place was the subtopic on "koinophilia" as well as the subtopic on "genetic evidence of interspecies sexual activity in humans", they both undoubtably have some relevance to the main topic of sexual animal behaviour but I felt as though it didn't need to be explained in its own individual subtopic.

Tone and Balance
This article is clearly very neutral, rather than being biased toward one side or another I found that this article is mainly just fact based. The authors are plainly just stating the information that is known on animal sexual behaviour. I don't believe there is any overrepresentation as this is a extremely large topic within animal behaviour if anything there was a few viewpoints underrepresented including how they mainly stuck to mentioning the sexual interaction of mammals not near as much that of reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and others. Some of the subtopics including parental investment and mating behaviour were not explained as thorough comparing to the other subtopics that were also relevant.

Sources and References
I most definitely did not check every single fact's source as there are over 150 cited sources but each individual fact that I did check worked and were reliable sources. Therefore I trust that each fact that is mentioned throughout this article is backed up by a credible current source. Many of which are actual scientific journals and articles. This is such a large topic within animal behaviour that there is an abundance of information that has been discovered and studied that is readily available to use.

Checking the talk page
The talk page of this specific topic does not have much conversation going on, it mainly just mentions how it needs to be expanded and more information needs to be added onto the page on a number of other subtopics including sexual behaviour of domestic animals, sexual behaviour of African mammals, mating behaviour of non-human primates and more. Another conversation that is ongoing includes the modification of an external link, only one was discovered as a dead link. This article is part of WikiProjects and is rated as C-Class, Mid-importance. The way the Wikipedia discusses compared the way we have discussed it in class (which we have not yet but I am sure we will) is that they have went into much more detail than we would ever get the chance to, I feel as though we will have a broader explanation of the overall topic.