User:Emilyd1997/sandbox

Article Evaluation

Article: "Tool use by animals". I chose this article because animals using tools to complete minor to complex tasks is very interesting, and I was curious to read about tool use by animals other than primates.

Lead

The Lead starts with a good definition of the topic. Following this, it summarizes which taxa this behaviour occurs in and gives a brief description of tool use in several different species. However, it may be too detailed, as a lot of information is put in the lead that would read better as part of a content paragraph. Could be rewritten to be more concise.

Content

The content of the article is very detailed, and separates examples into sections based on the animal taxa. The first section deals with defining what a tool is and what can be considered tool use. This information was important Only 9/143 references are from the last three years, so most of the cited information in the article is at least a few years old. It could benefit from the addition of more up-to-date content. For the most part, the content in the article is relevant, well cited, and gives a broad description of the topic.

Tone and Balance

The article remains neutral, presenting referenced facts without opinion or bias.

Sources and References

Overall, the page seems very well referenced, with citations after every few sentences. The majority of these references lead back to a scientific publication, so they are reliable. Multiple links in the sources were tested, and all of them were working. There are 143 references in total, so the information has been gathered from a wide variety of sources. However, only nine of these are from within the last three years, so the article could definitely benefit from some more new references.

In scrolling through the sources, one titled "Dog Grooming Tools & Supplies - The Pet Grooming" caught my eye as it did not seem relevant to the topic. This was reference #43, supposedly a source backing up that orangutans use a stick to masturbate, however it lead to a site about the importance of dog grooming.

Organization

The article is very well organized. The information is broken into sections based on taxa, with the major subheadings as mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and invertebrates. For taxa with many examples of tool use, the sections were further broken down into smaller taxonomic units. This made the article very easy to read and follow. If you were visiting the article to find information about tool use in a specific taxa, it would be very easy to locate due to this organization. I could not find any spelling or grammar errors during my read-through.

Images and Media

The article contains multiple images of animals using tools in different ways. They are well captioned, and positioned so that they appear next to content which is relevant to the images. The images are all sources appropriately, with most of them being from the creative commons. For most of the major taxa described, an image is present to help further explain the behaviour. Some of the photos are of poor resolution.

Checking the talk page

One issue brought up in the talk page had to do with the line "Another incidence of play in birds has been filmed showing a corvid playing with a table tennis ball in partnership with a dog.[113]". As mentioned in the talk page, this reference leads to a Youtube video of a human throwing a ball and a crow chasing it. According to the definitions given earlier in the article, this is not tool use. This issue was brought up in 2016 and is still not resolved. Most of the conversations are about whether or not things would count as tool use given the somewhat vague definition.

The article is given a B-class rating, and is a part of WikiProjects Animals, Cognitive science, and Technology.

Overall impressions

The article's strongest aspect has to be its organization. The information is separated into easy-to-read sections, and navigating to any particular area of interest is easy through the table of contents. It succeeds in covering in detail the use of tools across multiple animal taxa, giving plenty of written and visual examples.

The article could be improved by adding some newer references from the past few years. As well, it could benefit from a closer read-through to determine if any examples, such as the dog and crow story mentioned above, are actually an example of tool use following the definitions used. As well, the references could be checked to ensure that the links given are actually the correct ones leading to reliable sources, unlike citation #43 which lead to the dog grooming website.

This article is well developed and complete, though it could benefit from some editing.