User:Yunbing Song/sandbox

Article evaluation (Global Change)
Content:

Everything in the article is relevant to the article topic. It gives the definition of the global change, history of the global change, and what leads to global change and so on.

Sources:

There is information out of date in the section of Planetary management. The sources about how every country manages global change discussed in this article are all about those published 10 years ago, which are a little bit old. Thus, Current management of global change can be added to this article. In addition, this article lacks information about the negative impacts of global change. I checked a few citations, and I found that the third citation does not work. The source can support the ideas discussed in the article. Most of sources are not reliable references because they are found on the website not on peer-reviewed journal.

Tone:

The article is neutral. The article analyzed data on rising carbon dioxide emissions over the years to show that global change do exist. There are not any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position. However, there are viewpoints that are underrepresented. For example, the article does not discuss whether carbon dioxide emissions have increased in recent years.

Checking the Talk page:

The article rated as Start-class on the quality scale, and rated as Middle-class on the importance scale.

Article selection
The article I selected is Humidity. The article's content is relevant to the topic. It introduces 3 types of humidity, how to measure the humidity, the effects of humidity, and humidity in different places and so on. The definitions of absolute humidity, relative humidity, and specific humidity are easy for people to understand. The article is written neutrally because many sources and figures are used in the text. Each claim has a citation, and each sources are well-cited. There are some citations that are not reliable. For example, the first citation (the definition of water vapor) and the last citation (the reason why humidity is important in cooking) comes from a website which does not have author's name. In addition, some citations cannot be found using the links below the article. For instance, the links of 16th and 25th are invalid now.

Improvements:

The article lacks of a subsection which introduces what the most comfortable humidity for people is, and I found a peer-reviewed article which summarize this content. The source is called Air Humidity Requirements for Human Comfort. Furthermore, this wikipedia article uses only one sentence to briefly introduce the influence of humidity on human body. The sources can be added to improve it, such as the peer-reviewed article called Indoor Humidity and Human Health and The Effects of Temperature and Humidity.

Bibliography added on Humidity
People may not feel comfortable if the relative humidity in the air exceeds 60%. High humidity can pose a threat to human health through biological pollutants such as fungi and dust mites. One solution to control the growth of biological pollutants is to make the atmosphere relatively dry.

Copyedit an article
The article I chose to edit is Ecological stability.

First, I changed the original text, "It is possible for an ecosystem or a community to be stable in some of their properties and unstable in others; e.g., in response to a drought, a plant community might conserve biomass but lose biodiversity."

to " It is possible for an ecosystem or a community to be stable in some of their properties and unstable in others. For example, a vegetation community in response to a drought might conserve biomass but lose biodiversity." [Revised sentence structure]

Second, I changed the original text, "The concept of ecological stability emerged in the first half of the 20th century, and with the advancement of theoretical ecology in the 1970s, the usage of the term has expanded to a wide variety of scenarios."

to "The concept of ecological stability emerged in the first half of the 20th century. With the advancement of theoretical ecology in the 1970s, the usage of the term has expanded to a wide variety of scenarios." [Punctuation modification]

Third, I changed the original text, "Resilience is the tendency of a system to retain its functional and organisational structure after a perturbation or disturbance."

to "Resilience is the tendency of a system to retain its functional and organisational structure and the ability to recover after a perturbation or disturbance."

Finalizing topic and Find sources
The article I finally chose is Ecological stability.

Sources:

 * 1) This source can help me expand the definition of Ecological stability. (Source 1)
 * 2) This source talks about the relationship between diversity and stability. (Source 2)
 * 3) This source can help me explain how human activities affect ecological stability. (Source 3)

Peer Review 1 of Eggball2333
Eutrophication is really a problem that occurs in many cities now, which is an important part of Phosphorus cycle. You did a good job on explaining how excess phosphorus causes eutrophication. You also describe where the phosphorus come from, such as composting. It is great, but you might want to describe the consequences of eutrophication. For example, eutrophication can lead to algal blooms, the death of fish due to lack of oxygen, and the decrease of water quality.

In the second part, you introduce the solution of eutrophication (i.e. wetland) and illustrate how wetland deal with the problem of eutrophication in details. Maybe, you could also talk about other solutions of eutrophication, such as decrease the density of livestock, and regulate the use of fertilizers.

After all, you did a very good job by using many reliable sources and I cannot detect bias.

Peer Review 2 of Yunxin Song
Urban heat island is a very important part of global warming. In your draft of Urban heat island, you might want to give some examples of cities which experience the problem of urban heat island and talk about how these cities react to the problem of urban heat island. In addition, you could also illustrate where the heat island effect is most severe. Furthermore, you might discuss how human activities impact the weather and how urban heat island has impacts on human health. Moreover, you might compare the difference between urban heat island and urban cold island.

You did a good job on providing many reliable sources. The tone is neutral, and the article does not have bias. The construction of your sandbox is clear by listing headings and sub-headings.

Respond to Peer Review
After reading the peer reviews written by Peter and Yunxin, I will keep each section clear and well-organized. Additionally, I will add some figures that are linked to my topic and illustrate my points, making the article more appealing. I will also add more reliable sources to explain my points.

Critiquing articles
In the past, I only used Wikipedia to search information that I wanted to learn. However, after this semester’s training of Wikipedia, I know how to evaluate and edit articles in Wikipedia. It is very necessary for us to think critically when we evaluate an article. During the article evaluation, I learned that a good article must contain reliable sources to support ideas, a clear structure and unbiased sentences. The article I selected to evaluate at the beginning is ‘Global Change’, but finally I selected the article ‘Ecological Stability’ to edit. I chose the article for my assignment based on the quality scale and the importance scale. The quality scale of Ecological Stability article is C-Class, but it is rated as High-importance. This article lacks detailed information and reliable sources, but ecological stability is an essential topic in the real life. Thus, I chose this article to edit. After reading the article, I realized it misses several important sections, such as examples of ecological stability and factors that affect ecological stability. Then, I brainstormed and used Google Scholar to search more information about ecological stability, which helps me to decide what to add to the article.

Summarizing my contributions
In the article Ecological Stability, I added three sections: Variables of Ecological Stability, Anthropic Factors affecting Ecological Stability, and Ecological Stability of Forest Ecosystem. The first section (Variables of Ecological Stability) describes the 2 variables: Structural features and Functional features. The second section (Anthropic Factors affecting Ecological Stability) explains how human activities affects have a negative impact on ecological stability. The third section (Ecological Stability of Forest Ecosystem) summarize the current state of forest ecosystem (i.e. whether forest ecosystem is stable or not), and factors impacted on forest’s ecological stability.

I also added more information in the leading section. I introduced how resistance and resilience are related to ecological stability. I gave the definitions of resistance and resilience. I used 2 pictures to help me explain the definitions more vividly, which may make audience understand better.

Peer review
In the article Ecological Stability, I added three sections: Variables of Ecological Stability, Anthropic Factors affecting Ecological Stability, and Ecological Stability of Forest Ecosystem. The first section (Variables of Ecological Stability) describes the 2 variables: Structural features and Functional features. The second section (Anthropic Factors affecting Ecological Stability) explains how human activities affects have a negative impact on ecological stability. The third section (Ecological Stability of Forest Ecosystem) summarize the current state of forest ecosystem (i.e. whether forest ecosystem is stable or not), and factors impacted on forest’s ecological stability.

I also added more information in the leading section. I introduced how resistance and resilience are related to ecological stability. I gave the definitions of resistance and resilience. I used 2 pictures to help me explain the definitions more vividly, which may make audience understand better.

Feedback
I did not receive feedback from other Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedia generally
Through this Wikipedia assignment, I learned a lot. For example, I learned how to evaluate an article critically, how to edit a Wikipedia assignment, what reliable sources are and how to avoid plagiarism. I also leaned how to write an article that is suitable for all the public to read. There are similarities between Wikipedia assignment and other assignments. For instance, these assignments require reliable resources to prove their ideas. There are also some differences between Wikipedia assignment and other assignments. Wikipedia assignment can cite sources on its own automatically, while other assignments to cite the source ourselves. The articles in Wikipedia is easy for the public to understand because the article gives a clear definition at the beginning, the languages used are understandable, and the article does not use lots of terminologies. Even if people cannot understand one sentence which is paraphrased from other articles, they can open the link next to the sentence to see more information. This is important because this allows people who have not received a lot of education to learn more.

Ecological Stability [Final Draft] - Wikipedia Assignment
Resistance and resilience (recoverability) are related to ecological stability. Resistance is the ability of an ecosystem to block external damage. Larger the resistance is, the greater the chance that the ecosystem will remain at equilibrium state. Resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to recover. The more resilient the ecosystem, the faster and easier the recovery. As shown in Figure 1, Larsen (1995) provided an image which shows how ecosystems remain stable under resistance and resilience. The black cycle represents resistance, and the plane of the white checked black stripe represents resilience. Larger the area of the black cycle, the greater the resistance of the ecosystem. Deeper the hollow in the plane means that the ecosystem has greater ability to recover.

Larsen also drew a graph (Figure 2) which shows how global warming has impacts on resistance resilience of the ecosystem over time. As can be seen from Figure 2, over time, the hollow in the plane becomes shallower and the area of black cycle becomes smaller, meaning that there is a gradual reduction in resistance and resilience of the ecosystem due to global warming.

Structural features
Structural features indicate how the structure of the ecosystem affects its ecological stability. Take forest ecosystem as an example, structural features of forests ecosystem include the life span of trees, biomass, the diversity of forests, the diversity of flowers and animals. These factors can affect the ecological stability of forests.

Functional features
The stable functions of ecosystem can keep the ecological stability. The functional features include the nutrition cycle, water cycle, ecosystem production, and the interactions between organisms and so on.

Agriculture
A large amount of agricultural activities will cause huge damages to the terrestrial and marine ecosystem. Dr. Tilman indicated that the agricultural production has doubled in the past 35 years, which has led to an increase in fertilizer application and an increase in cultivated area. Once the phosphorus contained in the fertilizer flows to the river, lake, and ocean in a large amount, it will bring a serious of problems to the aquatic ecosystem, such as eutrophication. Eutrophication causes ecosystems to lose diversity, and thereby destabilizing ecosystems.

Deforestation
The massive deforestation of humans can destroy the self-repairing ability of the forest. After deforestation, the resilience of forests damages, so the forest ecosystem cannot keep stable. According to Daivs and Holmgren, if the area of trees being cut down exceeds ten percent of the total forest area, then the forest ecosystem will not be able to recover itself and will not remain stable any more. The more tree that are cut down, the more unstable the forest ecosystem is. Additionally, deforestation destroys the habitat of arboreal animals, resulting in the reduction in the population of arboreal animals. This has a detrimental effect on ecological functions, and ecological stability is also affected.

Ecological Stability of Forest Ecosystem
The number of forests decreased dramatically around the world in the past century, especially in Europe, breaking the ecological stability of forest ecosystem. This draws the attention of scientists, and they started to discuss what caused the significant descend in the area of forests. At the beginning, the conclusion was that the loss of forest area was caused by the inadaptability of forests to climate change, acid rain and the proliferation of pests. However, scientists found that the main reason for the decrease of forest area was that human activities reduced the ecological stability of the forest.