Wikipedia:Peer review/Neuroplasticity/archive2

Neuroplasticity

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I have been working on this article to a certain extent, but, while I have a rough idea of what I think needs to be done (as I mentioned on the talk page), I'm not really satisfied that I'm going about it in the right way. I think the article needs a much clearer idea of what needs to be done, as I think it ought to be completely rewritten to improve it - the "History" section is especially problematic, but it does have some decent information in it. Another problem that I've come across is that I'm struggling to differentiate between the "Research and discovery" section and "Applications", and I'd ideally like someone more knowledgeable than me in this area to give me some ideas about how to approach this: what sort of information is most relevant, how the article should be organised, what's missing etc. I can see the problems with the article, but I'd like some more detailed ideas to look for ways to improve.

Thanks, Jhbuk (talk) 18:34, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comment: I'll take a further look, but just for starters the link checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds two dead urls in the citations, and the alt text tool shows that the images need alt text for sight-impaired readers. WP:ALT has explanations and examples. Finetooth (talk) 03:54, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

Further Finetooth comments: If I were re-writing this, I would read carefully the general advice listed at WP:MEDMOS and look at the organization of the example articles listed at WP:NEURO. In general, I'd be inclined to put "Definitions" first, "History" second, "Neurobiology" third, and "Applications" last. I would probably modify these as I went along, changing the heads and adding subheads as necessary.

• I'd move away from organizing the "History" section around a series of individual paragraphs on particular researchers and instead organize by chronology. This would mean finding and citing secondary works that have evaluated trends (first this, then that, then the next thing). As it is, we hop from James in 1890 to Lashley in 1923 to Bach-y-Rita in 2006 to Merzenich in three unspecified decades to Nudo in an unspecified time, and so on. The sense of an orderly progression is lost.

• I would greatly reduce the attention given to individual researchers. Something like "His first encounter with adult plasticity came when he was engaged in a postdoctoral study with Clinton Woosley" will mean nothing to most readers. Who is Clinton Woosley? Does it make any difference where Merzenich first encountered adult plasticity?

• I would try to find sources for all of the article's significant claims. As it stands, many of the article's claims are unsourced. For example, the "Treatment of brain damage" section begins: "A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity... ". This claim and the rest of the paragraph it's embedded in lack sources. Who says it is "surprising"? My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every direct quotation, every set of statistics, every claim that has been questioned or is apt to be questioned, and every paragraph. If after careful searching I can find no source to support a dramatic unsourced claim, I delete it (giving an explanation either in my edit summary or on the article's talk page or both).

• I would remove from the "See also" section any linked terms that appear in the main text.

• I would turn all of the references that are not already in-line citations into in-line citations and, simultaneously, make the two-part reference section into a unified whole.

• Instead of a long "Further reading" section, I'd try to reduce or eliminate it by incorporating its most important ideas in the main text.

• I'd look for ways to reduce the number of links in the "External links" section.

I hope these few suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 06:25, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm aware of most of these problems, but I was hoping for some information on things that should/shouldn't be included, missing information etc, although thanks for the review. Jhbuk (talk) 19:29, 10 March 2010 (UTC)