User talk:Leah Curnew/sandbox
Article Evaluation[edit]
The article I am evaluating for the Week 3 Assignment is called the Waggle Dance.
Here, is the evaluation of the chosen article:
- This article is not a part of any WikiProjects.
- Everything in the article is not relevant to the article topic. For example, in the section called "Description" another dances, such as the tremble dance and the round dance are briefly mentioned. As seen in this line: "The consumption of ethanol by foraging bees has been shown to reduce waggle dance activity and increase occurrence of the tremble dance". The mentioning of these dances is irreverent to this section becuase they are not part of the waggle dance. The appearance of these two dances was distracting because it gives the reader the impression that these dances are part of or of importance to the waggle dance, which is a miss belief and adds unnecessary confusion to the article. If the information about the round dance and the tremble dance was omitted from the article, the issues outlined above would be eliminated.
- Overall, the article is neutral and does not appear to to have any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position. This is evident based on the sources used and the use of citations. For example, this is seen in the section called "Evolution". In this section, all types of communication motions that may have lead to the waggle dance are listed and referenced, without persuading the reader that one type of motion is more likely to have lead to the waggle dance than other. Thus, this shows that facts are stated in the article with basis. This is seen in the paragraph: "Ancestors to modern honeybees most likely performed excitatory movements to encourage other nestmates to forage. These excitatory movements include shaking, zig-zagging, buzzing and crashing into nestmates. Similar behaviour is observed in other Hymenoptera including stingless bees, wasps, bumblebees and ants.[17]"
- Mostly all the sources used in this article are appropriate and reliable references, such as journals like Nature and Animal Behaviour, and books like Nature of the Linguistics Sign. One reference, number 11 is not from a peer-reviewed source becuase its from a BBC Earth News article and thus, should be removed. In addition, references 24-26 do not link to any source but source the article itself, as seen in this line: "As a result, foragers reported to be attached to their food sites and continue to revisit a single patch many times after it has become unprofitable.[24]". These references should be replaced by peer-reviewed sources becuase the article Waggle dance is not a peer-reviewed source. In addition, it is incorrect for an article to cite itself. However, all the sources used are neutral.
- The information is correct but needs to be updated - more details and more recent references need to be added. The references are mostly from the years 2000-2010 with few articles being younger than 2010, such as reference number 21. Thus, the information in the article would be further supported if more recent articles were added (if any are present). For example, this line: "If multiple bees are doing the waggle dance, it's a competition to convince the observing bees to follow their lead, and competing bees may even disrupt other bees' dances or fight each other off.", would be better supported if recent articles describing experiments were cited. In addition, more detail is needed. For example, there is no mention about the well known fact that these bees use their compound eyes/ocelli to detect the suns angle. They must known the angle they travelled at in order to tell the other bees the angle. Thus, without knowing the angle the food source can not be found (Personal Communication Chapman, 2017). This detail is important to include becuase the angle is key knowledge that needs to be communicated in the dance. Thus, knowing how they obtain the angle is relevant to the waggle dance. Also, the "Applications to operations research" and "Dance language as a language" sections are a hard to understand, specifically in context to the waggle dance. In these sections, it is unclear how the waggle dance is related to these headings. Therefore, these sections need to be clarified by explaining how this dance relates to these sections. Lastly, all the sections are not balanced. For example, "Evolution" contains less information than "Description". This can be fixed by expanding sections and making other sections more concise.
- Yes, the links to the citations work. For example, the links for the citations in the line "Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance".[5] works. The paper used in this citation does support this article because this paper by Frisch was the first paper to describe how the the bees use the dance to pass along information. However, some sentences are missing citations, as seen in this line: "A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase." This can be fixed by adding citations to peer-reviewed articles.
- This topic has not been discussed in class yet. However, this topic was talked about in my entomology class in Fall 2017. When comparing it to the entomology class, the aspects of the dance talked about differed from those talked about in Wikipedia. For example, in class we talked about well understood experiments that showed how the waggle dance was a behavioural act. Also we talked about how these bees use there compound eyes/ocelli to detect the suns angle, which was not covered in this article. In addition, the article talks about how electric fields may play a role in the waggle dance and the evolution of the waggle dance, which we did not cover in class.
- The talk page had four sections present. However, these sections were more statements with at most one reply than conversations. In addition, they were not centred round how to represent the topic but rather on editing and areas that were unclear or, irreverent or, not well explained. For example, the section called "Not a bee" was just pointing a minor error in the first image - the image showed a fly and not a bee. Another example is in the section called "Comments on article", which points out two unclear areas in the article, "the dance language vs. the waggle dance", and "Efficiency and adaptation", and points out "Applications to operations research" was not well explained.
- Overall, this articles is rated as okay and needs work because even though the article provides information in an unbais easy to read form, it is still missing information, contains unnecessary and unclear information, and unbalanced with citations missing, as stated above.
--Leah Curnew (talk) 13:39, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
Peer Review[edit]
Hey Leah! I really enjoyed reading your article this week and I think you’ve done an absolutely fantastic job on it so far. As Dr. Wilson mentioned, the point of peer feedback is to be constructive and try to help improve the article from a different point of view. Also, what I am critiquing is only a rough draft and so you were likely planning on making some of the changes I will mention on your own. Below I have listed some comments that you could consider as potential edits to your article as we move forward towards our final article drafts!
Lead I found that your lead (introductory) paragraph was a bit long. While examples are great, I think that the lead is supposed to be a more concise version in which you could basically read only the lead and known the ‘gist’ of the article. Your second sentence needs a ‘the’ between ‘at’ and ‘nest.’ ‘Allofeeding’ is misspelled at the start of the third sentence. The third sentence states that allofeeding is a result of parents or non-related individuals, but then the next sentence states that siblings may also be involved, and so you might want to add this to the other sentence. Of course you’ll want to keep some of the information about each of the major sections to follow (ie. allofeeding between mates, allofeeding and parental care, etc.) but I think you could get rid of some of the details and simply add them to the major paragraph section for each. For example, the final sentence of the second paragraph in the lead section, (about Gray and Siberian Jays) could be moved to that section, and out of the lead. The same thing for the first sentence of the third paragraph about the example of the King Penguins. Instead of having the reason for allofeeding within each little section of the lead, I think you should consider a paragraph in the lead on the significance of allofeeding and potential evolutionary or adaptive benefits/reasons why it exists. The tutorial for this week said its important to know why the article topic is important, just from reading the lead. In general, I think your lead gives a fair amount of attention to each section that will follow, and I think you’ve conveyed most important details, so that is awesome!
It seems like I’ve spent a lot of time talking about your lead section, but that is because I really think the rest of the article is great. I do have a few things to mention but they are all quite small. The sections were all well cited. For all of your section headings you’ve used capital lettering, and on Wikipedia these should be lowercase except for the first word (unless genuinely a proper noun). Throughout these sections you tend to go from past tense to present tense, so perhaps consider just reading through and changing everything to one tense.
Allofeeding between mates At the end of the third sentence there is a “(2)” so I’m not sure if that is a missing citation, just something to note prior to moving the article to the main space. In the second last sentence you mention ‘other researchers,’ (I did this in my article too!) and from the Tutorial I just completed, apparently that is too generic and we need to be more specific.
Allofeeding and Parental Care The study you mention for the King penguins regarding the 22% and 65% is confusing. I think its a really good example but maybe try to clarify what exactly you mean, ie. what is a marked adult?
Overall, I love the structure you used and how you’re planning to have three (or four) major points that you go into depth on. I think the examples you’ve cited are great, and all of the references are properly cited and peer reviewed. The tone of the article is encyclopedic, and informational rather than persuasive, and the examples used throughout are relevant and interesting. Great job!