User:AllisonStacho/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

Environmental impacts of animal agriculture

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

I chose this article because I found it well represented the course content in that it implemented the importance of short-term use of food and resource management and the impacts it has on economic and environmental societies in an industrialized setting. I also chose this topic due to my personal reasonings as I resonate with the topic, being vegetarian and wanting to work in animal conservation after graduating.

This article matters because I think it is important to remain educated on a topic as vital as one as climate change and animal agriculture. It not only touches on the environmental impacts, but also health and physical impacts it has on the individual and I think it is an important topic for anybody to consider reading - especially for a course related to food and resource management, how industrialization has consequently impacted society, and the effects it has on the environment and ourselves.

My preliminary impression of it was that I liked how unbiased the article was, despite how sometimes biased I can be. I enjoyed the language they were using - it was easy to understand but also compelling to continue and also the length of the article made me want to read more and see all of the information they actually had to offer.

Evaluate the article

The lead section of this article provided a very generous overview of the topic at hand. The article was going to be discussing the environmental impacts of animal agriculture, and how the meat production industry specifically causes the largest amount of environmental harm out of all greenhouse gas emissions in a multitude of ways - through air, water, and land pollution, through excess resource use, through the release of greenhouse gas emissions, and much more - and these very significant topics were the highlight of the article. The introduction did not carry any information that was not present throughout the article, but it also was concise in the sense that it was not overly detailed and all information present was necessary to formulate what the article was going to be about. The lead section perfectly summed up what the article was going to be about.

The content presented in this article was extremely significant to the topic. The article was discussing environmental impacts on animal agriculture, and it starts off by talking about animal consumption and the possible projections moving forward with the progression of the human population. Afterwards, the content starts to talk about the impacts of resource use - food consumption, land use, water use - and then the impacts that has on the environments - water pollution, land and air pollution, etc. These are all extremely relevant topics for the content at hand, when applying them to the context of how these industrialized farms impact these environmental factors. The content also discussed biodiversity impacts and mitigation efforts, all topics that were referenced in the lead section and major topics for the article at hand. The only topic that seemed mildly out of place was the topic about antibiotic resistance specifically because it wasn't mentioned in the leading section of the article, but is still an important health hazard in context of animal agriculture. The content in the article is up to date, with multiple studies being shown to be as recent as of 2022, and all topics were supported by multiple sources with similar, considerable lengths of information and no gaps in information.

The article is neutral in the sense that it is describing the environmental impacts of animal agriculture, therefore it describes the impacts that meat production has on the overall environmental and human population. That being said, the article delivers the points in a neutral tone, but in the mitigation efforts does mention that the best way to mitigate GHG emissions would be to stop meat production entirely, which could argue a biased point of view in a certain way or opt towards a certain viewpoint. However, when supporting the claims with scientific sources of future projections of human populations and how meat production will only skyrocket alongside the increase of the population, saying stopping meat production in its entirety may not be biased at all but just a viewpoint supported by claims. I think the article does attempt to sway the reader in a knowledge sense, trying to educate them to get them to understand that animal agriculture is a larger problem than what the general population may believe, but I don't think it persuades them in a whole sense to stop eating meat entirely.

All key pieces of information throughout the article were backed up with at least 1-2 sources, most information having more than that. The reference list was long which was a huge benefit to me, with the links I checked all working, and the authors from a variety of different backgrounds and organizations that were all applicable to the topic. The sources were current, most being within the 2017-2022 range, few being below that given the list of references was quite long. Perhaps there are articles from 2023 that could be implemented now to update the article as well, but other than that the sources seem to be updated and significant for the information provided.

The article was concise, easy to understand, detailed, and educational without having too much jargon or being confusing. Considering a lot of the topic is scientific and discusses air pollution and GHG emission, the jargon and scientific language was reduced to a minimum and was easy to understand. The article was very well-written, didn't have any spelling mistakes that I caught, and was extremely well organized. Each section wasn't overly detailed, but covered the main points it needed to, and wasn't too long as to lose the readers attention while still getting across all relevant information. Each section was broken into sub-parts, and was relatively the same length to show that each was equally important and had relevant information.

The images were well represented, fit into the article nicely, and made sense based on the topic being presented. For example, when talking about antibiotic resistance, the authors put in an infographic discussing antibiotic resistance and how this impacts humans, which is important to the topic being discussed in the article. When talking about food consumption and animal grazing, there is a photo of two cows grazing, and if you click on the photo description it discusses the impacts of dryland grazing on methane emissions per cow in a given day. Each image was properly cited, well-captioned, and also adhered to Wikipedia's copyright regulations. My only suggestion would be perhaps to have received a more scientific outlook on the images that were inputted - while they were easy to understand and gave good representation to the article, perhaps an image about the greenhouse gas cycle or something along those lines would have been a good implementation as well.

The talk page conversations were mostly recent editorials conversations about removing unnecessary sections of information, and adding images that were relevant to the content within the article, and removing sources that added no meaning to the content. The article was apart of 4 different Wikiprojects, all ranking C-class, high-importance and one mid-importance. The way Wikipedia discusses the topic is similar to the content discussed in class, as it touches on limited resource uses and the impacts it has on our environment, how food usages and population impacts our environment, and much more.

I think overall the article is a completed article - it highlights on all the topics that are significant to the article: environmental impacts on animal agriculture. It touches on how meat production impacts all of these other factors of pollution, how to mitigate these factors, why these factors occurred, historically when they occurred, how they are likely to get worse if they do not change, they are backed up by a significant amount of scientific sources, etc. I would say it is a relatively unbiased article as well, however delivering on the fact that meat production needs to essentially be halted can potentially seem biased if not considering the scientific viewpoints of this and also the fact that there are other mitigation efforts alongside this one as well. The strengths of the article is that the content delivered reflects highly on the topic itself, the content is well-written and easy to understand and does not deviate from the original topic.

The only changes I would suggest in the future would be to highlight further on all mitigation efforts, adding more scientific images to further emphasize specific processes that are being described in the article, as well as integrating the health aspects of antibiotic resistance in the leading section of the article if feeling it is significant enough to include in the content section.