User:Georgiapeach5/sandbox

Article Evaluation 09/17/2021

Article 1: Selenium Cycle

Content

Everything in the article is relevant to the topic and up to date. I think it would make sense to add a section about how crop farming interacts with the selenium cycle and how selenium toxicity can harm aquatic environments. I also think the article should include more specific organisms that are part of the selenium cycle instead of keeping it vague. The information is presented clearly, but contains a good bit of jargon. Most of the jargon is hyperlinked to other Wikipedia articles which is useful. Because the article is pretty short, I think it would make sense to expand on some of the jargon instead of expecting a reader to click off to other articles 10+ times to fully understand the content. The article does not have a specific section with links to similar articles, but the page clearly shows that it's part of a series on biogeochemical cycles and the article itself contains many hyperlinks to other articles. Overall, what's there is well written and accurate but should be expanded upon.

Tone

The tone of the article is completely neutral and informative. It is straightforward and lacks bias. I am surprised that there is not a section that discusses human interaction with the selenium cycle or selenium toxicity since these are heavily mentioned in the sources. It's likely the author omitted this information because it could easily be seen as biased and politicized the issue instead of keeping the article neutral.

Sources

The links in the reference section of the article work, and the information in the sources is on par with what is in the article. The article definitely needs improvement with the in-text citations; there are whole paragraphs that do not have any footnotes. It seems like the uncited information is still coming from the 4 sources in the reference section and the labeling just needs to be updated to reflect which fact is coming from which source. Each source is from a peer-reviewed journal such as Ecotoxicology and Environmental Science. The Wikipedia article does not include any references to climate change or human interaction with the selenium cycle but the majority of the sources do; this is a possible bias from the sources but it does not show through in the Wikipedia article whatsoever.

Article 2: Mercury Cycle

Content

Everything in the article is on topic and up to date. The article only includes one sentence about mercury accumulation in fish as well as a sentence about accumulation in Xenophyophores. I think this information is relevant to the mercury cycle, but out of place in it's current section and should be moved to a new section. Because humans consume fish, specifically tuna, with mercury, we are part of the mercury cycle and should be included in the article. Aside from that, the article does a good job explaining where mercury comes from and what the processes are in the cycle. The article does have links to several relevant articles such as mercury poisoning and mercury in general. The article contains some jargon, but it's hyperlinked to other articles for explanation. I found this article easier to understand the the Selenium Cycle.

Tone

The tone of the article is completely neutral; there is no perceivable bias. I'm curious if the author did not include anything about mercury poisoning in seafood because the issue could be seen as political or biased. I don't think mercury poisoning is anywhere near as controversial as topics like climate change, so it's possible the author just didn't feel that information was necessary or did not have time to add it.

Sources

This article has a lot of sources, and the links that I checked work. The information presented in the sources seem to match up with the information in the article, and the author does a great job tagging the appropriate reference after each stated fact. The sources are a mix of peer-reviewed journals and trustworthy websites such as geology.com. A few of the articles talk about anthropogenic mercury as a pollutant, which could be seen as a biased source. However, this is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article so it remains unbiased.

Article 3: Calcium Cycle

Content

This article is mostly on topic and up to date. It is certainly the most thorough article out of the three that I read and contained the most sources. I think the section about human consumption may stray a bit from the intended topic, but is still relevant when looking at calcium as a whole. The article did a great job of discussing the calcium cycle as a biological process and then breaking down into more specific aspects like human and plant interaction with the cycle. The article contains a lot of images which is useful to break up large walls of text and provide a deeper understanding of the material. Overall, the article includes everything necessary (and then some!) and is written in a straightforward yet scientific way. There is some jargon but it is hyperlinked to other Wikipedia articles for explanations. I think the article should contain a "See Also" section with other relevant articles.

Tone

The tone of this article is pretty neutral and very informative. I think the author does a great job of discussing sensitive topics like climate change with an unbiased, factual approach. Perhaps the author could have also included the viewpoint of the calcium cycle not changing due to climate change, but I don't know if that's even a verifiable or fact-based viewpoint. When talking about calcium mining, the author remains very unbiased and discusses both the drawbacks and benefits of the mining.

Sources

This article has a lot of sources and the links that I clicked on worked. The sources are predominantly from peer-reviewed journals with a variety of disciplines from environment to human health. Both the article and the sources seem to do a good job addressing potential biases. The article needs to increase the number of in-text citations, there are several paragraphs that have none or very few footnotes. It's clear that the information is coming from the sources listed at the end of the article, and the article just needs to be updated to reflect that.

Figure

This article contains several figures outlining the calcium cycle. They are either properly cited, public domain, or created by the author (which is very cool). I think the figures do a good job supplementing the reading and helped me better understand the cycle.