User:Wildinnn/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Coral reef

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article as I am very interested in the coral reefs. I own corals myself in a saltwater aquarium and aspire to work around coral reefs one day. I chose this topic as our recent human anthropogenic activities have endangered these coral reefs. Briefly mentioned in this article is the threats posed to the coral reefs. The release of greenhouse gas emissions resulting in sea level and temperature rise has resulted in the lost of many corals and if this continues, many species will become extinct. Additionally, the human activities that have caused the rise in temperature has also resulted in more intensive storms that destroys the corals and their habitats. In turn, this can cause ecological impacts on the fishes that relies on them as a habitat and for their symbiotic relationships. My preliminary impressions is that this article was very strong in terms of informing the reader about what is a coral reef. It also informs the reader about where these coral reefs can be found and the formation of these organic beings over millions of years. The images on the article page also clearly portrays what coral reefs look like and the diversity of these different types of corals. They are also well captioned with many containing further detail about a specific coral and where they are found. The article also displays the importance of coral reefs with certain industries such as tourism and fishing industry relying on coral reefs to bring high economic values to the table.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

According to the talk page, the article lacks mention of the diversity of the corals for instance ; cold-water corals. It heavily implies that corals mainly forms in tropical regions. Additionally as the years goes on and human activities intensify, the reef restoration and protection parts of the article should be edited and new marine protected areas will appear.

The sources in this article are well referenced however, many of them seem to be outdated. For instance "Over 4,000 species of fish inhabit coral reefs." this source came from a paper in 2001 and therefore new and more recent information should be added. The same goes for " they provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species" as sources came from 1997, 2001, 2009. As mentioned above, with recent human activities the lost of coral reefs have been significant. Even mentioned in the article is that coral reefs have declined by 14% from 2009 to 2018. These outdated source are therefore unreliable and should be changed.

For future improvement on this article, a deeper look into the anthropogenic activities should be taken. For instance, yes humans have released emissions into the atmosphere but how long will it take for these effects to take place and affect coral reefs, decades, centuries? Additionally, as mentioned above the outdated sources need to be replaced by more recent peer-reviewed articles. Otherwise, the article seems strong in informing readers about coral reefs and their basics. Additionally, protecting these coral reefs will benefit agents such as the tourism and the fishing industry while preserving biodiversity for the planet.