User:TraitorousClod

Class peer reviews

Peer review by Hannah:

Hi Daryl!

Great job, this looks great and like you've put a ton of effort into it! I have a few quick notes

• Your introduction is really in-depth, maybe think about reframing it to be a bit of a broader overview so that readers aren't overwhelmed immediately.
• Your sections about the various regions and how humans interact with insects is great, but I would be mindful to not be reliant on a single source too often.
• Your structure and flow is lovely, as you expand, add more of the links to other articles so your readers can fall down the wikipedia rabbit hole!

Well done!

Peer review by William:

Great read, the article is looking good! I did a couple minor grammatical fixes, like fixing an "is is" and alike. I think linking up a few things to other wikipedia articles would be helpful - for example, Limpopo or the catepillar species.

Within your Venda section, I saw the following: "Within in rural communities still practicing traditional diets Grasshoppers and Mopane..." and wasn't sure how you might want to fix that. Also, is there a reason "grasshopper," "locust," and "mopane" are sometimes capitalized and other times not?

I'm not sure if this is due to a WillOfTheWiki (talk) 02:38, 28 March 2019 (UTC)lack of information, but maybe a more similar structure to the subsections would be good? Like Region/People > Nutrition, Beliefs, Uses.

I also agree with Hannah that the introduction is a bit specific for a general overview.

Other than these minor things, it certainly reads like a good wiki article!

WillOfTheWiki (talk) 02:41, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Dr. Shaffer comments:

Looks good. I would recommend building out what you have - maybe looking for additional sources to support your current material. The mopane worm article (Gonimbrasia belina)has some additional citations that you might find helpful for expanding a little here. You might also want to think about adding a little material in your intro to discuss why it is important to understand African entomophagy and ethnoentomology - I added a note there.

Article evaluation: Environmental social science

My first impressions tend toward this article being a brief interlude to the concept, and this is reflected on its talk page and WikiProjects board. It is short and generally rated as a stub-class. The talk pages show that the article needs a lot of work to being it up to a level that is more cohesive. Something that stands out is how much of a placeholder this article feels for the subject, for instance is the section that basically tries to encapsulate all of the thought of the discipline into the "Ideologies, fields and concepts" section. Many of these concepts would be worthy of expansion into their own categories within the article. Although those concepts that are present are sourced rather well, leading to scholarly work by Paul Robbins as recent as 2012. That's something that is important for an article like this especially, since the data itself needs to be up to date, and it looks as though the sourced work is mostly past 2012 save for the first edition of the Social Epidemiology book which was published in 2000 (the article references the 2014 version). It shows how this page is a burgeoning development within the 'transdisciplinary" field as they called it in the leading section.

As far as the neutrality of the article, within the focus of the discipline the views expressed are neutral, however taken into a larger context a bias could be inferred. Though in representing the positions of those who work within the field causes such a conundrum regardless. The focus on the social epidemiology makes the article seem a little be over-representative of that particular sub-discipline within the scope of Environmental social science. It seems as if in this sense 'environmental' means not necessarily a biosphere or ecosystem, but rather human controlled constructs brought on by urban development or other policies as well. This makes it seem that when the article talks about environment it takes on a different meaning within this sub-category--not meaning 'nature' per-se.

Several of the citations link to books on the subject, some almost like textbooks on their respective subject. The first is linking to a book by the publisher Wiley Blackwell which is for scholarly, scientific, medical, academic journals. This makes the publisher seem like a legitimate source for this sort of material. Routledge as well is a publisher for scientific and academic journals for the humanities and social sciences. Other publishers are academic journals as well, such as Oxford University Press, Journal of Epidemiology, as well as utilizing government agencies such as the World Health Organization, or Center for Disease Control. Although the article is short, the references are from established and credible sources, though like any publisher, not without their biases. A potential bias is implicit in the sort of article it is, one that is critical of anthropocentrism in their approach to environmental social science. The book on political ecology does represent the positions espoused in the article, and the location of the data within the book were accessible through google books to confirm. The fact that some ecologies can be political or a-political, or that an expansive view of ecology is necessary, one that incorporates "human relations and structures." into the mix. Some of the sourced pages could be inaccessible to check, such as Conservation and culture : beyond anthropocentrism, or Social Epidemiology which aren't available to view a majority of the referenced pages. The CDC, and WHO are considered reputable sources which the article references. Those links go directly to web pages on the respective sites which provides data supportive of the concept in the social epidemiology section of the article. When referencing the journal of epidemiology, the factual basis for their assessment is what's included in the article, which is accurate according to the section from the journal--the usage of the epidemiological triangle to understand health which incorporates environment "in the broadest possible sense" in it's evaluation.

This article seems to have been a part of a WikiCourse in 2017 (Wiki Ed/University of California Berkeley/Development and the Environment (Fall 2017)). Much of the talk page is suggestions and requests about how to improve the article, the first back in March 2012, while the most recent being from November 2017. Generally it seems that there isn't exactly a conversation occurring here, but only suggestions for the article, and explanations of why it is important and worth the consideration of improving it. The article is of interest to many WikiProjects, though it seems relatively inactive since 2017. (WikiProjects: Environment, Anthropology, Archaeology, Crime, Economics, Geography, Linguistics, Law, Politics, Psychology, Sociology) Generally the article is rated stub-class of low-importance except for environment where it's rated mid-importance. In class when we talked about this concept we came from a view that it was somewhat nonsensical to consider humanity and it's society as separate from ecology, and the article doesn't really try to push that point too strongly. It is written in such a matter-of-fact emotionally dry way that the importance of the concept feels somewhat banal and subdued. Another way potentially to consider this sort of explanation is perhaps this sort of "null" prose, reflective of its conception as an encyclopedia. Just to be frank about it, it can feel eerily strange at times to read topics like this on Wikipedia, though not so much this article since it is so short. In person dialogue within the classroom is very substantively different than the sort of conveyance of information on Wikipedia, even if the information might be similar or the same. I kind of enjoy it when a different sort of discourse is utilized, one that has an appeal to the passions, though I do respect Wikipedia's goals and understand their rationale.

Random edit practice

Within South Africa traditional medicines draw from not only medicinal plants from but animals as well. Some example of this zootherapy in practice is the utilization of the bones of baboons as a treatment for arthritis, or the blister beetle (Mylabris sp.) as a treatment for skin diseases.