User:Hayes.966/sandbox

Evaluation of Article

The last paragraph under the header, "Acidity, pH, and Alkalinity" does not mention alkalinity at all in the paragraph, nor does it give a reference to another wikipedia page with the definition of acidity nor alkalinity. Also, pH is the measurement of acidity, so classifying them as two different things can give a misunderstanding to the article and cause confusion to the reader. The name of this header should be changed to something else. Also, the first paragraph of this article does not give any references at all, and it is the definition of paleoceanography. This needs a citation. Hayes.966 (talk) 06:01, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Evaluation of Article

Under the "Midden," header, the article mentions that pack rat middens have surpassed pollen records as a "method of study," but they do not clarify what kind of method of study and they do not mention how or why.The citation used for this leads to an unfound page. Also, the entire net paragraph in the middens section goes unreferenced, a citation needs to be added to the end of the paragraph. Also, the grammar needs to be corrected where it states the three factors contributing to resilience of midden should not be in its own sentence. There should be a colon before it lists the factors instead of a period and the factors should be separated by a comma, not a semicolon. This part of the article makes it seem like it was self-published.

This article is a poor explanation of the use of the proxy in past climate because it simply states that the carbon isotope ratios in the middens have been widely studied but do not go on to elaborate how these studies show information of past climate. This is making an assumption that the reader already knows how carbon isotopes portray climate data. There should be a wikilink to a page about carbon isotopes and how we can decipher climate data from the isotopes. it only goes on to say how size of the pack rat gives us information about temperature through Bergmann's rule. It needs to elaborate on how these factors give us information about climate and include more examples of how middens can help determine past climate. The article does not give any sort of weaknesses of the climate proxy, it only states that it has been used more than pollen records but does not go in to detail about why.

A peer reviewed article that would contribute to this information would be http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0168933#sec002 this article mentions where the middens of pack rats are found and how changes in climate are shown by the vegetation content of midden. Another peer reviewed article that could be helpful is https://geochange.er.usgs.gov/midden/ this article uses discourse that is easier to understand in terms of scientific language. It also uses graphs that display the radiocarbon all the way from 50,000 years ago. Hayes.966 (talk) 08:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)