Wikipedia:Peer review/Cystic fibrosis/archive1

Cystic fibrosis

hmmmm this is so WEIRD —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.2.160.254 (talk) 02:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC) This is a former Medicine Collaboration of the Week. It's been entirely reworked and is fully referenced. We are working on obtaining more images and would appreciate it if anyone has a public domain chest x-ray of CF sitting around their hard drives! We would love to hear what everyone has to say about the article (aside from the known image paucity and current arrangement problems!). I am working on closing all red links in the next few days, as well. InvictaHOG 04:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Positives

• Huge ammount of references.
• Very very detailed information.
• Information on treatment etc, very valuable information supplied.
• Very well researched and compiled

Negatives

• A little bit too long
• Big bodies of text
• Slightly difficult to read due to the mass of information supplied

Suggestions

• Perhaps divide the article a little bit clearer
• Reduce the ammount of information supplied and perhaps create sub articles for ex: "Treatment of CF" and "Symptoms of CF"

Nick carson 09:04, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback! There's a lot to address here and to work on, it would seem. Is there some way to check the length of an article with certain parts excised? My past experience has been that external links and references add considerably to article length (I don't know if cite.php changes this!) and this article is actually much smaller than two other FA I've worked on (multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer) and closer to a third which had much fewer references (pneumonia)! It sounds like the structure is part of the problem from your comments on blocks of text and difficulty reading. The overall framework is taken from the medicine template and follows the goal for all medical articles. However, within each broad category there's obviously room for improvement! I'm interested in what you find to be unclear about the divisions - is it wording in titles, a need for more divisions, the order addressed, etc? Offloading subsections is something that has been used to great effect in other medical articles. However, I'm afraid, at least for the symptoms section, that the abbreviated version often left in the parent article will either be too technical or too imprecise! The reason for the overall length of the symptoms section is because of the need for lay explanations/interpretations of the symptoms (and because CF affects a lot of organs). If off-loaded, it would cut down on the length but I doubt that the replacement list of symptoms such as "bronchiectasis, recurrent pneumonia, pancreatic insufficiency, distal intestinal obstruction, etc" would really be preferable! Treatment is a much easier proposition to off-load, but I suspect that a few more subheadings might make a difference. I've made a few additions, let me know if they improve things at all! As for the amount of information - what are the particular areas that you think go overboard? As you might imagine, there's already significant truncation and abbreviation in every section. Thanks again for your input! InvictaHOG 16:27, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I redid the headings and sequencing of the symptoms section. I think it looks and reads a lot better now. Let me know what you think! InvictaHOG 18:59, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

• Feature this now. This is stunning! I would not support further forking of the content. The bodies of text are just fine (5-10 lines is fine, 15 is still acceptable). Highly referenced, very reliable and up-to-date with the latest guidelines. JFW | T@lk 20:11, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
• Brilliant The article is fabulous. WP:FA -- Samir (the scope) धर्म 21:59, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

• The article is slightly overlinked which makes it more difficult to read (birth, infertility, infection, antibiotics - just in the first paragraph). The list of notable people is a bit non-standard (and includes some people that probably aren't all that notable) - could it ber merged as prose into the history section? I'm not sure if wikiroject medicine has this guideline, but it is standard practice in scientific literature to italicise gene names (non-italics for the protein). One last thing, please don't put wikilinks in section heading or bold text - they look terrible.--Peta 04:05, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the thoughtful comments! I've delinked the bold text that I found. I am looking for a reference which italicizes CFTR. It certainly is a fairly widely used standard, but since everything that I'm looking at has it just as we do, I'm not sure if it is some exception? I'll dig further. As for the overlinking, I got about halfway through but it still needs more work. There's definitely some gratuitous double linking. As for the famous people bit, we unfortunately have this with every disease. In the past, we have spun off a separate article in list form. I think that with a disease like CF, it is actually nice to have successful people showcased because of the historically dim prognosis. II have created a new page for them. An alternative would be to discuss the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation within history or in a separate section, as several of the important people on that list were involved there. But, I think it works better this way. Thanks again, I'll work more on it later (have to go to work!) InvictaHOG 10:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

By all mean don't remove the notable people completely, it'd just work better if you could incorporate the listed material into the text more smoothly.--Peta 11:08, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

While thearticle is impressive, I'm not for all-out gushing just yet:

• the "Prenatal diagnosis" and "Theories about the prevalence of CF" sections look out of place, they look like they should be subsections. Also, "Theories about the prevalence of CF" is only one paragraph long, something that is shunned by the MoS.
• Several instances of double linking within a few words due to redirects, such as "recessive gene" and "autosomal recessive", "meconium" and "meconium ileus"...
  • Similarly, a few cases of unnecessary overlinking (tobramycin, twice within 4 lines)
• Stool is complete jargon (and is not even wikilinked). It should be replaced with something else.
• "problems breathing" could generally do with being switch for "breathing problems"
• Nasal polyps are mentionned twice, without any explanation as to why CF causes them.
• "Bile secreted by the liver to aid in digestion may block the bile ducts within the liver, leading to liver damage." This sentence implies that this may happen in normal conditions. It should be made clear why this is here specific to CF.
• The article does not explain the link with infertility.
• The second paragaph in "diagnosis" looks vaguely out of place. The first sentence is also very poorly phrased in regard to the rest. The paragraph seems to describe tests used to monitor (not study) patients for particular complications (not symptoms).
• Is CFTR the name of the gene or the protein? Does that protein have a specific name? Also, the gene is often referred to as "CF", and often as "CFTR", this is confusing.
• Antibiotic resistance is referred in several instances, but not linked.
• "The role of chronic infection in lung disease" the first2 paragraphs of this section have no refs
• The sentence "One way in which infection has spread is by passage between different individuals with CF." comes completely out of the blue as tehre is no previous implication that these infections are contagious.
• Image:CFTR.jpg is blown bigger than its base size. It could probably be rather easily reproduced at higher quality by a qualified wikipedian, too.
• You might want to look into the proposed merge of ΔF508 into this article.
• "Other methods to treat lung disease" section appears to discuss preventive treatment (against mucus thickening) and symptom relief (breathing problems) rather than treatment of the diseases themselves (pneumonia)
• "may be managed more conservatively" ???
• What is "lung exercise tolerance"
• As trivial as it may sound, I'd like to see a cite for "several clinical trials [of gene therapy] have been initiated"
• Maybe expand some on the most frequent cause of death in individuals wit CF, since CF does not appear to requently kill the patients itself?
• Consider reformatting the two notes containing bare URLs. Personally, I like {{cite web}}
• It'd be nice to have a comparisons with "normal" stats for the 191 pregnancy number.
• "However, testing, as of 2006, is recommended for couples who have a personal or close family history of CF as well as couples at high risk because of their ethnicity such as those with Northern European or Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry." This sentence is poorly constructed, and the purpose of "however" is unclear.
• A few refs needs to be moved after punctuation per WP:FN style.

There. Hope you can forgive my rather extensive pickiness.Circeus 18:25, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the input! I'll work on these things over the weekend (finally finishing up a stretch on service) and hope to fix them to your liking! InvictaHOG 23:26, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you again for the thorough reading - close attention such as yours is absolutely required to make a great article. I have addressed the bulk of your points and the article has definitely improved as a result. I plan to self-resize the image when I am back home on my own computer. I also prefer to keep the referencing system standardized and think it's nice to leave off a separate system such as cite web - I am not currently planning on introducing a separate system unless there is a unified call or guideline available.

A few other points I'm going to need clarification on, however. The stats for "normal" pregnancy is confusing - do you want the total number of prenancies in the US, among "of age" women, etc? The CF stat is not one which is meant to be compared - it is simply there to show that there are non-trivial numbers of women with CF who are pregnant in a random year. Comparison wouldn't seem to give that more clarity. The bile duct blockage sentence does not imply that it happens normally to me - in fact, it is always abnormal. I think that, taken in concert with the prior sentence, more detail is not necessary but let me know what you feel is unclear. As for infertility, how CF leads to infertility is well described in the section on infertility - let me know what it is that is missing. ΔF508 is a separate page and, personally, I believe that it deserves its own page. It should be merged with CFTR and not CF, in any event. I have reviewed a lot of literature about the CFTR gene and protein - I do not know why it deviates from convention, but CFTR seems to. I have not found italicized gene names and the protein name seems to be the same as the gene name in every database and paper I pull. I believe that every instance of CFTR in the article is clear as to the product being referred to. I've tried to prevent your reading of "lung function and exercise tolerance" as "lung exercise tolerance" by linking exercise tolerance (without the lung!). As for the point about CF killing patients - I would hold that people with CF die of CF (unless they die of something like a car accident!). It doesn't matter if it's because of lung disease, heart failure, liver failure, kidney failure, complications of diabetes, etc. The root cause is CF and, just like the mantra "AIDS doesn't kill people," attempts to separate out cause and effect don't make much sense...let me know what you think. Thanks again for your close attention! InvictaHOG 02:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

• Indeed, some of my points resolved out of themselves(the merge I remove mentions of form the article since it hasn't been discused in months and was forgotten) or might not have compeltely appropriate(true, there is no sense incomparing the 191 pregnancy number).
• You might to have a good look at User:Ekem restructuration of the article, though. They split the "prenatal diagnostic" in several overly short sections and shortened the elad, amongst other changes that might play against you at WP:FAC.
• I converted the two web references myself. I do think they look better that way.
• That's it! Circeus 01:38, 1 June 2006 (UTC)