Wikipedia:Peer review/Food/archive1

Food

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it has a wide range of information regarding food but know it is still missing crutial details. I am looking for comments to improve the article from other editors.

Thanks, Tommy (talk) 02:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This article is generally well-written and interesting. It takes on a gigantic subject which I think would be difficult to cover comprehensively even in a big series of related articles. Although I think the article is commendable, it's uneven in quality from section to section. I've tried to note some of the places that I think need copyediting or relatively minor spiffing, and I've made a few comments about more substantive matters.

Well said. Thank you for the feedback. Tommy²⁰¹⁰ 01:59, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Lead Done

• The lead should be a summary of the whole article. This lead is well-written but only summarizes parts of the article. A good rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections. Missing any mention in the lead are commercial trade, famine, safety, legal definition, dietary problems, restaurants, and others. Even though you don't need to cram everything into the lead, this article is long enough to justify a lead of perhaps four full paragraphs. On the other hand, you might put off revising the lead until the main text sections have all become stable and more-or-less complete.

Food sources

• A good rule of thumb for sourcing is to provide at least one source for every paragraph and to source every claim that has been questioned or is apt to be questioned, every direct quotation, and every set of statistics. The first paragraph of this section is unsourced even though it contains information that is not common knowledge. For example, many people would not know that Nori is an underwater plant eaten with sushi. Where does that information come from? Ditto for other unsourced paragraphs in the article.

Sweet Done

• "Complex carbs are long chains and thus do not have the sweet taste." - "Carbohydrates" rather than "carbs"? Also, "long chains" needs a brief explanation, possibly an illustration.
• "Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose are used to mimic the sugar molecule, giving one the sense of sweet, without the calories." - Wikipedia avoids self-references such as "one" in this sentence. The problem is usually easy to avoid by re-casting the sentence; e.g., "Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose are used to mimic the sugar molecule to create the sense of sweet without the calories." Ditto for other sentences in the article that use "one" as a pronoun.

Cooking equipment Done

• "Different cuisines will use different types of ovens, for example Indian culture uses a Tandoor oven is a cylindrical clay oven which operates at a single high temperature... ". - Words missing?
• The proofreading seems to have broken down in this section. I fixed a few things at the beginning, but the sentence noted above is mixed up, and "cook-tops are used to heat vessels placed on top of the heat source, such as a sauté pan, sauce pot, frying pan, pressure cooker, etc." starts with a lower-case letter, and the list of pans and pots seems to illogically modify "source". The next sentence repeats the word "method" four times. On the other hand, the examples of cooking methods are good as are the illustrations.

International exports and imports

• The article is already long and complicated, but this rather dry section does not mention the effect of food exportation on hungry people living in the food-exporting countries. It also does not mention that some countries such as Haiti depend on food importation for survival rather than convenience.

Marketing and retailing

• This section seems U.S-centric, whereas the one above it is international. I'm not sure what the solution is; you've tackled a truly gigantic topic. I think something needs to be said about food distribution in non-industrial economies. Which countries do not have supermarkets? What other sorts of food-distribution networks exist in the world? What about subsistence farming?

Prices

• This information is outdated, and some of its claims seem doubtful. For example, "In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize" is an extraordinary claim depending on what "long term" is taken to mean. One report by CNN is not sufficient to support a claim like this. A basic sense of supply-and-demand economics would seem to suggest the opposite: if world population continues to increase, at some point demand for food will exceed the upper limits of possible supply. That would seem to guarantee price increases in the long term. If you get into the economics of food, I think you need to include something about the related questions of population, the limits of industrial agriculture, the dwindling supply of ocean fish, and the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. All of this is complicated and in many ways highly controversial. I can easily imagine a separate large article devoted solely to this topic.

Food aid

• Another complication is that food aid is not only a problem in the "neediest countries". I live in a rich industrialized country but only two blocks from a food bank for people who are struggling to get enough to eat.

Nutrition and dietary problems

• This section is unsourced and reads too much like an essay. For example, "As previously discussed," is a phrase that might appear in an essay but generally not in an encyclopedia article. "Unfortunately this promotes obesity in adults and children alike" is an editorial statement coming, apparently, from Wikipedia. It therefore violates WP:NPOV. That is not to say that the claim is false, just that it is unsupported by a citation to a reliable source and does not take into account opposing viewpoints, if any.

Other

• Some of the links in the citations are dead. The link-checker tool at the top of this review page reveals the dead links.
• The dab tool finds 12 links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.

Legal definition

• "Some countries list a legal definition of food." - It might be helpful to name two or three specific countries that have such definitions and then use the definitions to show what they have in common and how they differ.

References

• The references with urls are malformed. For citations to on-line sources, include author, title, url, publisher, date of publication, and access date, if all of these are known or can be found. The templates at WP:CIT are useful for organizing the footnotes, or you can do them by hand without templates.

I hope these 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. We are always in need of willing and able reviewers, upon which the whole system depends. Finetooth (talk) 18:26, 28 March 2010 (UTC)