User talk:Juan Prieto/sandbox

Assignment 1: Critique of Chlorosomes

Chlorosome is a low-quality article with lots of room for improvement. The first thing that came to my attention was the number of sources, or lack thereof. Only four sources make up the entire article, meaning the potential for bias is higher. Bias is shown in the Organization section, which itself makes up more than half of the entire article. This section of the article was heavily focused on the experimental methodologies and results from Ganapathy's et al. study. This imbalance of perspectives caused misrepresentation of methods done in other listed sources.

It’s worth noting that the inclusion of the Organization section is questionable because of its irrelevancy. Readers are most likely not interested in the experimental design of chlorosome structure determination, but rather they would be more interested in what the chlorosomes actually do.

In the article’s lifespan, only one Talk page comment suggested improvements to the article. He suggested including the Rod model hypothesis for chlorosomes. He provided links to sources and an image he claimed to have designed himself. The diagram looked informative and could be a nice inspiration for the integration of a new section on the biochemistry and importance of chlorosomes, which would help the overall quality of article.

Just some last words. The List section seemed unnecessary and I think should be excluded. Also, the first paragraph from Organization, which talks about components of the chlorosomes, would be better placed into the Structure section because both contain similar and related material.

Reflection

This assignment taught me just how much effort goes into the development of a Wikipedia article. Even material that has been there for years is susceptible to criticism. Going forward, I hope this learning experience will help me effectively edit (and construct) a Wikipedia page.

References

Juan Prieto (talk) 06:30, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Assignment 2: Oligotroph

The article I’ve chosen for editing is Oligotroph. After reading the article, "Oligotrophic environments" had subsections that were poorly developed. For example, only one sentence was used to describe the presence of oligotrophs in Antarctic environments. The lone sentence described Lake Vostok as a primary example of an oligotrophic environment due to its 15 million year isolation from Earth under a sheet of ice. With respect to oligotrophs, this could not possibly be the only thing that has been said about Antarctic environments.

After browsing the Revision History, the last known revision of the Antarctica section was its inclusion into the article in 2009. Since then, there hasn’t been major changes to this article and I wanted to know why. After doing some research on Google Scholar, I found 700 articles relating Lake Vostok and oligotrophy. I managed to select a few sources that would help improve the current information published on the Wikipedia article. One source in particular mentioned microbes living in Lake Vostok had a population density that was comparatively high for an environment with low nutrient content. As I kept reading more articles, I was beginning to see that the Wikipedia article had some serious knowledge gaps. This can be attributed to the fact that the concept of "Oligotrophs" is such a broad topic in itself, which makes finding sources to include into the article an intimidating task.

Even the slight edits are valuable in an article’s development and I want to make my own suggestions. I was inspired by how oligotrophs can live in high density, despite lacking nutrients. Is there competition within these environments, or do oligotrophs have other mechanisms for survival? Also, what mechanisms allow some oligotrophic species able to adapt and survive in below freezing temperatures? With the number of sources pertaining to this sub-topic, it’s apparent that this section has significant coverage with reliable and independent sources. These reasons alone make this article worthy of improvements.

References

--Juan Prieto (talk) 15:59, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Mabel's Peer Review

Overall, Juan's content additions are very clear and relevant with great depth of details, and are appropriately placed within the Wikipedia page. He is able to extract the main details from the articles in his own words and present the information in a mostly well-balanced manner. To improve, I recommend refraining from comparing ideas without providing background information. For instance, he mentions that oligotrophs contrast with copiotrophs but does say how exactly they differ. According to the source used, "both oligotrophs and copiotrophs can survive in a poor nutritional environment" which makes it appear as if the two groups are similar. I recommend further explaining the difference(s). Another area he can expand on is how ice sheets are more oligotrophic than other microbial communities. What kind of communities is he referring to? As well, a very small formatting adjustment I'd make is to mention Crooked Lake at the beginning of the sentence so readers know that a new lake is being described right away rather than having chlorophyll a levels mentioned first. Otherwise, all his sentences flowed and fit well together. To be more concise, I would include Daphniopsis studeri with the rest of the species mentioned in the previous sentence. Another suggestion I'd like to make is to ensure that he checks his tenses. Although the studies occurred in the past, the information about oligotrophic environments is still present. For example, he should use "display" rather than "displayed" when talking about diverse oligotrophic environments, but the methodology should be in past tense. All of his information is cited with all eight sources being from peer-reviewed journals or articles, indicating high reliability. The only issue is that the information on Crooked Lake is based on only one source which demonstrates imbalance and bias, so I recommend using more sources here. Mabelz97 (talk) 07:40, 9 November 2017 (UTC)