User:Varelasara/sandbox

Article Evaluation: Carbon Neutrality
Evaluating Content

Overall the article is at a good starting point but is missing a lot of vital information. An introductory paragraph on why a country would be interested in becoming carbon neutral,including the environmental impacts of increased carbon dioxide emissions is necessary to provide background information. An introductory paragraph providing an explanation on carbon tax's would also be helpful for providing readers with a thorough understanding of carbon credits which are brought up later on in the article. The process section was nicely detailed and provided a strong guide on how to reach carbon neutrality, however; this section would be better suited after the simplification and definitions section. All of the information included was relevant and up to date, list of countries should be carefully monitored as they are subject to frequent change.

Evaluating Tone

The article was relatively unbiased except for the claim that the Climate Neutral Networks intention was to persuade companies, I believe this statement has an underlying undertone against the network instead of a neural stance, and should be reworded to avoid bias. The viewpoints on policy were well represented, however; a scientific viewpoint on carbon neutrality was underrepresented.

Evaluating Sources

The article lacked sourcing in many areas. The sources that were included were reliable sources, however; it was difficult to determine whether the sources were completely neutral. Most of the sources were from government websites and credible news articles.

Talk Page

The talk page discusses a merger between the climate neutral page and the carbon neutral page, which I and many other users disagree with due to the differences in which greenhouse gases are considered in the determination of neutrality between the two pages. The article is part of the WikiProject Energy and the WikiProject Environment/ Climate Change. The article does not currently have a rating because it needs additional citations in order to be verified, which I agree with.

Article Selection
Stream Restoration

This article is rates c-class in the WikiProject Environment and WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography. The article is well written but could use expanding. A section on the reasons and benefits to steam restoration would provide good background information before the techniques section. There are also many places within the article that are in need of citations, as well as, updating of current citations.

Glacial Lake

This article is rated start-class in the WikiProject Glacier and WikiProjects Lakes. It has very minimal information including an introductory paragraph, and 1 subsection. Expansion of both of these sections is necessary as well as inclusion of additional subsections. Possible additions could be glacial lake formation, glacial lake ecology and description of the major glacial lakes of the world. There is some discussion in the talk page about suspended sediments within glacial lakes that can also be addressed.

Flash Flood

This article is rated start-class in the WikiProject Severe Weather, WikiProject Meteorology/Flood and WikiProject Disaster Management. This article can be improved through the addition of a mitigation section and through a restructuring of both the causes and hazards section that are both very poorly written and biased towards the United States. A global perspective should be incorporated into the entire article.

Urban Forestry

This article is rated C-class in the WikiProject Forestry, WikiProject Urban Studies and Planning, and Wikiproject Architecture. The article can be expanded in all areas, including a new section about how distribution and vegetation types can have different effects on the urban landscape. The benefits section can be elaborated to provide a more in-depth explanation of the environmental benefits. The constraints section can also be restructured into paragraph format for further explanation. The reference section must also be revised.

Editing and Adding a Citation
Copy edit:

Original Introduction of Glacial Lake Article was edited and restructured to create a section dedicated to history of glacial lakes

Original: A glacial lake is a lake with origins in a melted glacier. They are formed when a glacier erodes the land and then melts, filling the hole or space that is has created.

Edited: A glacial lake is a body of freshwater with origins from glacier activity. They are formed when a glacier erodes the land and then melts, filling the indentation created by the weight of the glacier.

Citation: Yao, X; Liu, S; Han, L; Sun, M; Zhao, L (2018-02-01). "Definition and classification system of glacial lake for inventory and hazards study". Journal of Geographical Sciences. 28 (2): 193–205. doi:10.1007/s11442-018-1467-z. ISSN 1861-9568.

Finalizing Topic and Bibliography
Glacial Lake:

Glacial Lake Draft
Formation


 * The formation and characteristics of glacial lakes vary between location and can be classified into glacial erosion lake, ice-blocked lake, moraine-dammed lake, other glacial lake, supraglacial lake, and subglacial lake.

Climate Change


 * Since the deglaciation of the little ice age Earth has lost more than 50% of its glaciers. This along with the current increase in retreating glaciers caused by climate change has created a shift from frozen to liquid water, increasing the extent and volume of glacial lakes around the world. Most glacial lakes present today can be found in Asia, Europe, and North America. The area which will see the greatest increase in lake formation is the Southern Tibetan Plateau region from debris covered glaciers. This increase in glacial lake formation also indicates an increase in occurrence of glacial lake outburst flood events caused by damming and subsequent breaking of moraine and ice.

Sediments (addition to existing section)


 * The amount of sediment found in glacial lakes varies from four to six meters in depth, and has a general stratigraphic sequence of; organic muds, glacial clays, silty clays, and sands based on time of formation.
 * Over time the glacial lake sediments are subjected to change.

Biotic Ecosystem


 * A Seal at the Glacial Lagoon.jpgversity and productivity tend to be lower in glacial lakes as only cold-tolerant and cold-adapted species can withstand their harsh conditions. Glacial rock flour and low nutrient levels create an oligotrophic environment where few species of plankton, fish and benthic organisms reside.


 * Before becoming a lake the fist stages of glacial recession melt enough freshwater to form a shallow lagoon. In the case of Iceland's Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon located on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, tides bring in an array of fish species to the edge of the glacier. These fish attract an abundance of predators from birds to marine mammals, that are searching for food. These predators include fauna such as, seals, arctic turns and arctic skua. Glacial lakes that have been formed for a long period of time have a more diverse ecosystem of fauna originating form neighboring tributaries or other glacial refugia. For example, many native species of the great lakes basin entered via the Mississippi basin refugia within the past 14,000 years. *

Societal Perspectives


 * Glacial lakes act as fresh water storage for the replenishing of a regions water supply and serve as potential electricity producers from hydropower.
 * Glacial lakes aesthetic nature also stimulates economic activity through the attraction of the tourism industry. Thousands of tourists visit the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon in Iceland annually to take part in commercial boat tours and every two to four years thousands visit the Argentino glacial lake in Argentina to witness the collapse of the cyclically formed arch of ice from the Perito Moreno glacier, making it one of the largest travel destinations in Patagonia.

Work has been transferred to Wikipedia

Peer Review
Peer Review left on BN1998 talk page for Freshwater Acidification Article

Peer Review left on Fls098 talk page for Mangrove Restoration Article

Response to Peer Reviews
Based on the feedback of my peers I have gone back and made some edits to my article. As Mitchell and Brooke both suggested I made the climate change portion within the formation section more prominent and turned it into its own sub-section. I also added a citation in the sentence that was missing one. This feedback was very helpful in providing me with ideas to strength my writing.

Reflective Essay
After completing the assignment and making my own contributions to Wikipedia, I had a whole new perspective on public collaborative information sharing. Starting with the critiquing of already existing articles. This first step of evaluating articles allowed me to use the information  I had learned from the training modules about the five pillars of Wikipedia. I approached the article evaluation  by using the information  I had learned about Wikipedia's use of academic discipline categories for sorting or articles, in order to find topics related to earth systems. After filtering through the articles I used Wikipedia's rating system and connection to Wikiproject's to find the article that interested me the most. Once I had decided on my chosen article, glacial lakes, I used a combination of  Wikipedia guidelines and comments left on the talk page to critique the article. I focused on aspects such as; was it written in a neutral tone, and did it have the necessary reliable sources.

Once pinpointing the lack of reliable sources and missing information I decide that the most beneficial contribution I could make to the article was to restructure it and add additional sections to it. The biggest component missing from the existing article was that it wasn't organized in any particular way, making it very difficult to read due to the lack of flow. In the end, my edits consisted of restructuring the entire introductory paragraph, creating subsections for the already existing information, and creating additional sections of my own. My contributions gave the article an easily to follow flow and added  information vital to the public's understanding of the topic while making sure to include appropriate sources.

For the peer review process I offered critiques to two of the articles written by my peers. For BN1998's contribution to the freshwater acidification article I  suggested reviewing a few grammatical errors and adding additional information about the differences between freshwater and saltwater. For Fls098 contribution to the mangrove restoration article I suggested the splitting up of the mangroves climate change section into 2 subsections to increase the organization of the article. Multiple peers also reviewed my article and recommended some changes such as; the addition of citations, adding a section of climate changes impact on glacial lakes,  and adding additional information to the stratigraphic section. I found their recommendations very helpful and took them all into consideration. I was able to make many changes based on this, however, due to the lack of reliable sources available on the topic I was not able to add anything to the stratigraphic section and was only able to add a few more points to the climate change section.

I did not receive any feedback from other Wikipedia editors, however, if I had I think that it would have been very helpful in strengthening my writing. I will keep checking back on the status of my article even after this project is over and will make the appropriate changes once feedback is received.

Overall, I learned a lot about how to contribute to Wikipedia in an appropriate way that is beneficial to the reader. I learned about what makes a good quality source and  how to write in a neutral tone which I will not only use to contribute to additional Wikipedia articles in the future but can also use for other writing tasks throughout my life. This assignment was very different from other assignments that I've done in the past because it is the first opportunity I have had to make the information I have written available to the public. The assignment opened up my eyes to how easy it is to make positive contributions to Wikipedia and improve public understanding of environmental science. Adding reliable peer reviewed information to Wikipedia is very important so that the general public has a good understanding of the topic and is not misinformed. Especially in the case of Earth systems, there is a lot of conflicting information available to the public  that must be filtered to ensure that the information is accurate.