Wikipedia:Peer review/Self-harm/archive1

Self-harm

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to get an idea of how much work would be required to get this article up to FA status. It is currently a GA and has not been seriously peer reviewed before, it would therefore be very useful to have other editors opinion on the article. There are several editors that are willing to address any issues that may arise / make the necessary alterations to improve the quality of this article which addresses an important area of modern clinical psychology. cheers, Guerillero | My Talk 03:10, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

• I support this request for peer review, it would be very useful to know what needs to be done to improve the quality of this article. Polyamorph (talk) 09:31, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is very good, seems comprehensive to a non-expert (me), and well-supported. I see some overlinking and some problems with pronouns but otherwise not much to grumble about. Here are my suggestions:

Overlinking

• Linking a term once per article is often sufficient. Linking once in the lead and once again in the main text is sometimes useful. More than that is usually too much. For example, there's no reason to link "eating disorders" three times in the lead or "substance abuse" twice, "suicide" twice, or "burning" at all. More overlinking occurs in the main text, but I have not identified each instance.

Heads and subheads

• To avoid repeating the main words of the article title, I'd be inclined to shorten "Self-harm awareness" to "Awareness".

Lead

• Link Spell out the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders text revision" known as DSM-IV-TR on first use? It's linked in the second paragraph, but first use is generally better.

• "Captive non-human animals are also known to participate in self-mutilation, such as captive birds and monkeys." - To avoid repeating "captive" and to move the modifying phrase snug against the thing modified, this might be better: "Captive non-human animals such as birds and monkeys are also known to participate in self-mutilation."

Classification

• "An example of self-harm/self-injury is cutting" - It's generally best to avoid the front slash in constructions like this because it's ambiguous. In this case, I think you could simply delete "/self-injury" without altering the meaning.

• "is the second most common form of self-harm in the UK" - What is the most common?

• "A person who self-harms is not usually seeking to end their own life;" - "Person" is singular, but "their" is plural. Maybe "people" rather than "a person".

• "For many individuals self-harm is often an attempt to communicate one's distress." - Delete "one's", which is not used as a pronoun in Wikipedia articles and can simply be removed from this sentence without altering the meaning.

• "they harbor a desire to feel real and/or to fit in to society's rules" - The front slash is almost always a weasel best avoided. Which is correct, "and" or "or"? Or are "feel real" and "fit in to society's rules" mean the same thing?

Signs and symptoms

• "an individual's inventiveness and their determination to harm themselves" - Subject-verb agreement. "Individual" is singular; "themselves" is plural.

• "As well as defining self-harm in terms of the act of damaging one's own body" - Recast to avoid using "one" as a pronoun.

Mental illness

• "There are parallels between self-harm and Münchausen syndrome, a psychiatric disorder where those affected feign illness or trauma." - Maybe "involving feigned illness or trauma" rather than "where those affected feign illness or trauma"?

Pathophysiology

• "earlier in the sufferer's life (e.g. through abuse) over which they had no control" - Subject-verb agreement problem.

• The two-line quotation is a bit short for a blockquote, and the Manual of Style deprecates fancy quotation marks. I'd recommend inserting the quote in the main text with ordinary quotation marks.

• "For some people harming oneself... " - "Themselves" rather than "oneself".

• "it enables him/her to deal with intense stress" - I'd use "or" instead of the front slash.

Self-harm awareness

• Is Self-injury Awareness Day observed in many nations or just in the UK?

Avoidance techniques

• "when the sufferer has the urge to harm themselves" - Subject-verb agreement problem.

Images

• It's generally best to place directional images so that they face into the page instead of out. For this reason, I'd move the Murzi woman to the right side of the page, and the cockatoo to the left.

References

• I'd remove the titles such as "Mr.", "Miss", "Dr., and so on from citation 50, and list the authors by their last name first.

• Citation 47 should use "p." rather than "pp." for a single page.

• Citation 95 is incomplete. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and date of most recent access, if all of these can be found.

Further reading

• Book data should include place of publication. If you don't have this information in your notes, you can usually find it via WorldCat.

Other

• The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find one dead URL in the citations and one link (to "flow diagram") that goes to a disambiguation page instead of the intended target.

Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:31, 16 February 2011 (UTC)