User:Vapememes2020/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Thermoregulation

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to write about thermoregulation as it's one of the processes of animal physiology that I feel most comfortable discussing as I am somewhat more familiar with thermoregulation when compared to other physiological responses.

Thermoregulation matters because it is crucial for the functioning of enzymes in many organisms. It also matters because in (almost) every habitat there's minor fluctuations in temperature, so without being able to thermoregulate many organisms would be much less efficient. Lastly I find thermoregulation is important as it can significantly limit where organisms can live (for example a polar environment would be very difficult for a tropical lizard to endure as it mainly has to rely on behavior to thermoregulate which wouldn't work well in an environment where one can't simply escape the cold).

My initial impression of the article when just glancing at it before reading it was that the article seemed well made. However, analyzing the article fully showed me why it belonged in the "C-class" articles.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section:

I think the opening sentence in the lead is okay, but it seems to have a more endotherm-centric point of view, as it mentions being able to keep the body temperature within a certain range despite external conditions but seems to then go on to only discuss internal regulation while seemingly ignoring the behavioral regulation of ectotherms.

I think the lead was overly detailed, discussing concepts like hypothermia/hyperthermia in great detail when it was probably better suited to put that in the actual article. The lead also seemed to occasionally go on tangents about subjects that were at best tangentially related to thermoregulation.

The lead section seemed to make no effort to outline the sections of the article and instead seemed to go on long tangents about hypothermia/hyperthermia and the history of measuring thermoregulation (in relation to thermometers). This was especially bad because I don't recall hypothermia or the history of thermoregulation analysis being discussed in the article much (at least not by name), so much of these tangents would have been better suited to being separate sections rather than being part of the lead section.

Content:

The vast majority of the material I saw in the article was relevant to the topic and it seemed up to date, with the article further elaborating on some aspects of thermoregulation in great detail at times. Overall I found that the article was very thorough with its material as it seemed to cover almost everything relevant to thermoregulation that I could remember off the top of my head (and then some). However there were a few occasions where some material seemed a touch out of place but was still somewhat relevant to the topic (like how some monks can change their body temperature through meditation and how lower body temperatures may increase one's lifespan). There were also one or two times where the article would bring up certain topics and terms but not elaborate on these unfamiliar terms at all and also provide no citation or link to learn more about the topic. When it came to equity gaps and dealing with underrepresented topics I don't think this article covered anything of this nature, though I feel at times it did focus somewhat heavily on endotherms compared to ectotherms so this may indicate that it didn't try to deal with underrepresented topics.

Tone and Balance:

I found that for almost every section the article was fairly neutral, however the one section on longevity and lower body temperatures seems to be an exception to this. The author of the article seems to be in favor of a few studies showing how lower body temperatures increased the mice lifespan somewhat, however there does seem to be debate on this issue which wasn't mentioned in the article. For example I looked up the issue and the very first result I found on NCBI indicated that human women have slightly higher body temperatures than men but tend to live longer, giving direct contradictory evidence to the articles position. So this contradictory evidence was very underrepresented, and the view given regarding temperature and lifespan might be somewhat simplistic as a result. It's tough to say whether the article was trying to sway the reader to one viewpoint over the other, but by not discussing the fact that there's evidence to the contrary this may be the case. Though I don't think this is a minority view, as there does seem to be several papers looking at the correlation between aging and temperature. So while this view may not be a minority view, it seems unfair to present it as the only one by not mentioning competing evidence.

Sources and references:

I found that much of the article was backed up by credible sources, and it appears that the author(s) used the fullest extent of available literature one could get on the topic. However there were still some sections that seemed absent of any sources (like the section on ectothermic cooling and heating). Some sections (say 65% of them) had several citations supporting the material but for the rest of the article there would be large sections absent of any visible source.

While many of the sources seemed fairly recent (stretching from 2005 or later, many being from the 2010s) there were a few sources from the 1970s-1990s and I even found a couple sources from 1905 and 1911. So while generally the sources seemed up to date there were a few stark exceptions.

In some cases I think better sources could have been used. While many of the sources seemed to be peer reviewed articles and reliable books on the matter there were also sources such as Yahoo Health and Khan Academy (which aren't bad websites by any means, but I would be hesitant to use these as sources). However, despite these outliers the sheer amount of peer reviewed literature they used as sources seems to indicate to me that many of the better sources available were actually used in the article.

There didn't seem to be a focus on having a diverse spectrum of authors, however they may have unintentionally done so because they seemed to have cited at least 40 different sources, which could definitely result in having a wide range of authors and viewpoints involved.

Virtually every source used that has a link in the references section was still functioning, as I checked about 7-10 of them and all of the links worked.

Organization and writing quality:

I found that the article itself was fairly well written. There didn't seem to be any grammar or spelling mistakes and it seemed to be written quite professionally all throughout the article. The concepts were quite clear but the article wasn't very concise, as I found that sometimes the author repeated information that was already addressed a couple sentences earlier, or they had somewhat long run on sentences. However the information itself was easy to read and was quite clear.

I think the various sections that were used were very good for the topic at hand and covered most of everything one would need to know about thermoregulation, but at times the content within these sections seemed a touch sparse. I would also like to mention that even though I thought the various sections were good and covered what one would need to know about thermoregulation, they were organized strangely at times (for example the plant thermoregulation may have been better placed either at the end of the article or at least after behavioral regulation as opposed to where it's actually placed in the article).

Images and Media:

I found that the images were definitely a strong point of this article, most of the media seemed to really help better illustrate some of the topics discussed in the articles. The captions for said images seemed good, with them usually simply describing what was occurring in the image and how it related to thermoregulation (though some captions were a touch long). One of the few images I had an issue with was the simplified control circuit of human thermoregulation as the caption is exceptionally short and there's several symbols (likely for equations) which have no explanation as to their meaning in either the caption or image itself, which does more to confuse then help in understanding.

From what I can tell the images and videos seemed to fall under the copyright policies of Wikipedia as the material was either in the public domain, made specifically for the article, or were uploaded with an appropriate creative commons license. The images were also laid out well, as they didn't seem to really draw too much attention to themselves nor did they really obstruct the text.

Talk Page Discussion:

Many of the conversations I found were discussing various spelling, grammar, and organizational mistakes, some so noticeable that they were labeled as vandalism in some cases. One issue discussed several times is that the organization of the article was confusing and poor, though when I read the article I thought that maybe this issue was largely fixed or the organizational issues may have been exaggerated by some of the editors. One thing that was also discussed were several definitions the article used, for example they complained that cold-blooded referred to ectotherms early in the article but then seemed to refer to poikilotherms later in the article, and similarly warm-blooded seemed to refer to endotherms early on, but then to homeotherms later on. One of the main messages I got from the talk page was that the article brought up several topics that were at best tangential to thermoregulation (often without citations too). I did notice some of these issues in some cases, but they seemed to be less significant when I read the article so I have reason to believe some of these issues have since been resolved.

The article itself is referred to as a "C-class" article with "Mid-importance", and it seems to be part of 2 projects: the Biology Wikiproject and the Physiology Wikiproject.

This Wikipedia article definitely discusses this topic differently than how it was discussed in class, however this is likely because thermoregulation was only briefly discussed. For example the article was much more detailed on the mechanisms by which various animals (and plants) thermoregulate, it also discussed poikilotherms, homeotherms, ectotherms and endotherms by name (although the discussion in class about regulators and conformers seems to fall into this category), and the article also discussed things such as torpor, hibernation and estivation. However, the material covered in the article wasn't really covered differently than other classes I have taken (as I believe that I learned about at least 80% of the information in this article in my other courses like my ecology and plant biology courses).

Overall Impressions:

I feel that while the article in general is good and informative there's still a very clear amount of work that still needs to be done on it.

Some of the articles strengths include its images and media, which tend to really help in understanding the issues. I also found that the article was very informative, although at times some of the topics they discussed were only somewhat tangentially related to thermoregulation. The article provided a good, in depth discussion about the various aspects of thermoregulation. I found the grammar and spelling and such was also good, and the article generally felt professional in this regard to its writing. Another generally positive aspect about the article were its sources, as it used a large number of credible sources.

When it comes to ways of improving the article there's a lot to be said. One thing that I noticed frequently were the large sections without citations, so I think having more citations, and having said citations be evenly spread out throughout the article would help. I also think that at least half of the lead section (particularly the parts discussing hypothermia and hyperthermia) should be moved to a later section, as this felt way too detailed for the lead. At times I felt that some parts of the article (such as the part about monks being able to change their body temperature by meditating) weren't needed as this felt more like a "fun fact" as opposed to crucial information needed to understand thermoregulation. In other cases I think more detail would have been useful, because there were several terms that were brought up in the article without being elaborated on at all.

I also think that (at least for the section about longevity and lower body temperatures) it may be worth noting that this may not apply to humans as they mentioned in the article that females have a body temperature higher than males, but neglect to mention that women on average have longer lifespans than males. I made a big deal of this in the section on tone and balance, but this is mainly because almost everything else in the article seemed well established and uncontroversial whereas this section stood out like a sore thumb. While I found that in the chat many people were complaining about the organization of the article, I myself didn't find too much of an issue with it however I will admit it was strange how the article went from discussing vertebrate thermoregulation, then plant thermoregulation, then to behavioral thermoregulation again, then to human thermoregulation. So some minor changes to organization could probably help.

When it comes to overall completeness I think it is underdeveloped. As mentioned before, the article is actually fairly well done with regards to the level of detail. I also think the images and media in this article were good and they had a plethora of sources used which helps the article's credibility. However some things do need to be addressed. The slight changes in organization, the clarification of certain terms (like warm/cold blooded) and adding more citations throughout the article would definitely help. It would also be a bit helpful for some parts to be a bit more concise (as there were some run on sentences) while other sections could use more elaboration. Overall the article is fairly good, but it is underdeveloped in some areas.