User:SwallowInTheTrees/Evaluate an Article

 CONTENT WARNING: suicide 

Which article are you evaluating?
Animal suicide

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the of how interesting it initially seemed, and I was excited to see what exactly constituted suicide in an animal behaviour context. I want to know where the line is drawn between suicide, self-sacrifice, death by carelessness, sexual cannibalism (on the victim side), and generally any behaviours where an animal may reasonably expect death but follows through despite this. I stuck with the article because it didn't feel quite right. It didn't feel like a Wikipedia article (or at least, not what I've come to expect of Wikipedia).

Evaluate the article
The article starts off with a definition that too vague to have scientific value. According to this definition, as long as the individual animal dies at the end, any kind of self-destructive behaviour, whether initiated consciously by the animal or not, is considered animal suicide. It lacks a lot of nuance that even the small piece of the general Suicide article has in its comparatively small section on the topic. The lead paragraph is awkwardly worded, which decreases its clarity. At the end of the opening paragraph, it also references uncited general anecdotes as if they were common knowledge, which I feel should be properly referenced. Past this, the article as a whole feels like a list of anecdotes and rambling on topics that are mentioned in the article not to be examples of suicide (parasite section). The notion itself of 'suicide-inducing' is quite odd to me, semantically speaking, because in human terms, an induced suicide surely would not be considered a suicide. The content in this article could be improved with, for starters, a better definition and by prefacing the whole article with the nuance that it deserves. The existence of animal suicide itself is contested because it implies intent which is quite difficult to measure scientifically. This article should make this point a bit clearer and work with this in mind instead of dropping it casually every now and again.

Some of the references used are not particularly reliable, as many of them are blog posts. More thorough research into the topic is necessary to make it more informational and less anecdotal. This research could also justify the existence of this article, as some people in the talk page have pointed out, it may not be adding anything that is not mentioned somewhere else on the site already. The talk page echoes a lot of the concerns I have brought up, although it is sometimes a bit hostile towards the creator, particularly the most recent additions.

Following the research, if it justifies the existence of the article, the article's writing should be improved. Making simpler sentences and making sure they all add something necessary to the article is a start. The article could also use at least a handful of pictures, because there are none as it stands. I believe this article should exist, even if it is as a clarification for animal behaviours that resemble suicide. It should mention the other possibilities that may be causing these behaviours. It has a misconception section and explains the origin of the misconception that lemmings commit mass suicide, but not the behaviour of the animal that made the misconception plausible to some in the first place. As it stands, the article follows a formula that looks like this:

Some animals commit suicide in all of these ways -> but it isn't actually suicide.

I believe, pending research, if this article continues to exist its formula should be closer to this:

These animals do things that could be considered, or resemble, suicide -> Here are all the possible causes of this behaviour, regardless of whether it could strictly be defined as suicide.

This would make the article less of a collection of anecdotes, and more focused on the behaviour of the animals themselves, which seems to be the direction the editors on the talk page want to move to as well.