User talk:Rylance/sandbox

Assignment 1
A critique of the article, Heterotroph.

In the talk page, the article is rated as Start-Class on the quality scale, indicating poor reliability, and this can be observed by the mediocre content within the article. Although the article is neutral, showing no positional bias, there is some content within the article that is irrelevant and overrepresented. One example of irrelevance can be seen in the third paragraph, where much of the material is talking about autotrophs rather than heterotrophs. Being such a short article, the best use of the information written should pertain to what a heterotroph is rather than what it is not.

There is an overrepresentation of the different classifications of heterotrophs found all throughout the article. Every single sub-topic has some categorization of heterotrophs and does not say much about the characteristics of heterotrophs as a whole. An improvement could be to direct all the classifications under one heading and to balance the content.

Despite reliable, non-biased sources, a major problem in this article is the close paraphrasing the author used with their sources. For example, in the first paragraph, the author writes, "Ninety-five percent or more of all types of living organisms are heterotrophic, including all animals and fungi and some bacteria and protists." The associated source writes, "At least 95% of the kinds of organisms on Earth—all animals and fungi, and most protists and prokaryotes—are heterotrophs." Formulating this sentence in the author's own words would greatly improve this article.

Reflection I learned how to be able to properly critique a Wikipedia article without being subjective. I found it difficult to look up the author's sources and analyze the validity of it, but it was easy to determine if the article content was relevant.

References

Rylance (talk) 03:01, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Assignment 2
I choose the article, Lithotroph for editing.

In examining the article, I noticed the abundance of cited sources except within the section, Geological Significance. The lack of sources harms the credibility of the article as a whole, plus introduces potential cases for plagiarism. For example, the sentence “Lithotrophic microbial consortia are responsible for the phenomenon known as acid mine drainage, whereby energy-rich pyrites and other reduced sulfur compounds present in mine tailing heaps and in exposed rock faces is metabolized to form sulfates...” appears to be near word perfect from other unreliable sources. This sentence could either have been plagiarized or stolen from Wikipedia. The geological significance of lithotrophs, however, is very relevant to the main topic and does not overrepresent the article's content.

I have chosen to edit this subsection, Geological Significance, not only to include citations and fix potential plagiarism, but also to add missing gaps within the section. In the first paragraph, it explains the liberation of nutrients for cycling and the formation of soil, but it never explains how those processes occur. As well, in the second paragraph where it mentions acid mine drainage, it does not go into explicit detail as to how lithotrophs metabolize certain compounds. In including these detail to better explain these lithotrophic processes, I believe it will provide a better understanding of the geological significance of these organisms. Furthermore, I have researched and found multiple articles that describe present-day applications of lithotrophs that could be included in the Wikipedia article to emphasize its importance in modern day environmental issues.

I have analyzed and confirmed that the Wikipedia article, Lithotroph, has high notability due to its abundance of citations within the article. Not only that, there appears to be a host of reliable and unbiased articles relating to lithotrophs found on Google Scholar, thus providing significant coverage of the topic.

References

-Rylance (talk) 03:40, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Adam Mesa's Peer Review
You did a very good job expanding the Lithotroph section “Geological significance” with the addition of a lot of properly structured, neutral content. The creation of the three sub-sections helps quickly find the appropriate information of interest to the reader, with no noticeable structural errors.

Some of the writing and content could be more concise and rephrased. Mentioning the “as observed by Dr. Barry Johnson in their research at …” is superfluous, with a reference alone being sufficient. The sentence directly after this could be more concise, with the words “harsh toxic substances” being changed accurate for the context (i.e. “toxic” denotes being poisonous to an organism, however rocks are not alive. What’s one or two specific molecules that carry out this function of breaking down rocks?). Other sentences such as “… they have been found well over 3 km below ...” present in the original section could be re-worded to remove the brackets. The last sentence of the sub-section “Biogeochemical cycling” seems as if it could be more neutral and straightforward (i.e. removal of the words “critical role”, cutting down the run on sentence).

For your sources, source #3 has a non-functional doi link. The other sources look good, but aren’t easily available online and are difficult to view as a result. Primary sources such as journal articles should be chosen over secondary sources (textbooks) due to their peer-reviewed nature and easy accessibility. The second paragraph in the acid mine drainage needs more citations for a few facts (i.e. specific pH levels and endangerment of animal populations downstream). - Adam Mesa (talk) 07:14, 8 November 2017 (UTC)