User:User3530/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Texas Longhorn)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am interested in the conservation of animals and I wanted to learn more about this endangered species. It is important to learn about these types of animals that are endangered and see what can be done to try and preserve the species. With a preliminary viewing of this article it does well in explaining what the Texas Longhorn is with basic information about the animal. The page also has two other sub-headings that explain the history of the animal and a different section that talks about the decline the Longhorn had in population and its subsequent revival.

Evaluate the article
The lead section properly uses the introduction sentence to concisely explain what a Texas Longhorn is and what it is best known for. The lead section of the article has a brief description of the history of the Texas Longhorn, but it does not have any mention of the second section of the article being the decline and revival of the Longhorn. Everything in the lead is present in the rest of the article except for one line at the end that talks about the longhorn being used for steer riding which does not pertain to anything that is present in the rest of the page. The lead is concise and detailed but it could do without the unnecessary sentence at the end about the steer riding. The content of the page is all relevant to the topic of the Texas Longhorn. Although the page was created in 2008 the page has had many edits over the years to help make to content as up-to-date as they can. The article is shorter so there could be more that could be added to the page but overall it is concise and descriptive, so it does the job well as a shorter article. This article is marked as a level-5 vital article in Biology, Animals topics and is does not deal with Wikipedia's equity gaps. The tone of the article is neutral and does not swing the reader in any particular direction. There is no longer anything in the article that is heavily biased to a certain position, the talk page had one of the original posts talking about a theory for why the population of the cattle is declining but that section has since been removed by an editor. The viewpoint in the article are not really overstated and the smaller viewpoints are really stated at all. The article does not try to persuade you to a position, the page just talks about the history of the longhorn and the decline and revival of the longhorn population. The facts in the article are backed up by a secondary source and are properly cited to wikipedia pages. The sources are thorough and are current as the editors have fixed the citation issues the page in the past. The links on the page work and the articles cited are written by many different articles and give reliable information. The article is well-written with great detail and is easy to read. The grammatical errors have been fixed by editors and the page is well organized with broken down into sections that make the article clear. The images do not really enhance the page besides showing you what the longhorn looks like. The captions are very bland and just say Texas Longhorn in whatever part of the world the picture was taken. The images are appealing to the eye and they adhere to the copyright regulations that Wikipedia has. Many of the discussions on the talk page are just asking questions, but there were a couple of discussions that points in the article that they didn't agree with or have not been properly talked about, but those sections have been removed by editors. The article is rated as a C-class article and was talked about for a good article nomination. The main difference in the talk pages and the discussion we have in class is that the talk pages tend to learn towards the negative and things that they did not like in an article, while our discussions in class are more just bringing up thoughts and reactions to the readings we do. The strengths of this article is the concise and detailed content relating to the history and revival of the Texas Longhorns. The article is well-developed but the article is short so the main are of improvement is adding more sections. The page currently only has a lead section, a history section, and a section about the decline in population of the longhorns. Overall this is a well-written article with not many errors but the lack of sections in the article is where it falls short.