User:TV2424/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Mobbing (animal behavior)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because "mobbing" is a behavior I have not previously heard of in any animals other than humans and I was interested in learning more about what it is and what species predominantly display this behavior. According to the article, mobbing is an antipredator behavior used to protect their offspring therefor it is important for their life histories and maintaining a population. This article seemed like a great read with a great introduction that defined the behavior well and caught my attention enough to want to drive deeper and learn more about this behavior.

Evaluate the article
The leading section started out well with the definition of "mobbing" and examples of what this behavior could entail. The very end of this section includes a section that relates this behavior to human behavior which I thought was a great way to allow the reader to either stop, click on the wiki link and dive deeper into human mobbing, or continue on with the article; this was a nice addition for me. In addition, the leading section only contained information that was relevant to the rest of the article including what species display this behavior, the evolution of this behavior, and some of the signals that initiate the behavior. Unfortunately, I think the content of the article could be improved in a few sections, for example, in the "other animals" section, the author merely touched on a few of the other animals who display this behavior. I think more information could be added about larger groups such as fish, birds, mammals, ungulates, etc. and further described in relation to one another; this point was briefly mentioned on the talk page as well. The tone of this article was neutral and gave the impression that it was purely meant for educational purposes. This is the ideal tone for reading informative articles to make sure the author isn't subjecting their biases onto the reader. The images included are also relevant and the descriptions were accurate and concise which helps the reader understand what mobbing behavior could look like in different species. The author has included a fairly lengthy reference list but I think there were sections of this article that could have used cited sources. For example, in the "other animals" section, in the second sentence of the second paragraph, a source is not provided to back up this claim. I thought that perhaps the sentence after would include a source to back up this claim but it did not. For the most part, the authors references seemed reliable with the exception of #3. This is an article from "TIME" magazine and I don't think that it is an excellent source to use, perhaps the author could have followed up and found a peer reviewed source written by the expert quoted in the article. As I previously mentioned, the talk page has been used for this article. The discussions in this section were all helpful and were only used for positive criticism such as formatting/layout tips, how to improve the quality of the article, and additional theories that could be included (which were present in the current wikipage). With a rating of B-class in both "WikiProject animals" and "WikiProject birds" I think this article was great, however I think it could be improved with some additional attention to detail and further explanations as mentioned above. With these concluding statements, I wanted to include that I don't think this article is complete, but it feels like a great start; the writing is clear, well written, and concise.