Wikipedia:Peer review/Osteochondrosis/archive1

Osteochondrosis

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for November 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want suggestions of how to make my article better. Thanks, Ccde56 (talk) 00:15, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an informative short article on a subject of general interest. I can't assess the content scientifically, but here are some suggestions for improvement.

• With a general audience in mind, you might wikilink or explain more of the uncommon terms. I added a couple of links by way of example. In the lead, I linked "ossification" and "etiology", and in the "Cause" section, I linked "chondrocyte". I see others such as "parthogenesis", "anatomic conformation" that most readers would not be able to define. On the other hand, I don't think you need to link common terms like "blood" or "pig". The idea is to help the reader understand the subject.

• Link the first occurrence of a term rather than skipping the first occurrence and linking a subsequent one. When I encountered Kienbock's disease in "Presentation", I wondered what it referred to. It wasn't linked until the next section.

• The Manual of Style advises against repeating the words of the main title in any of the section heads. Thus, I would change "Human osteochondrosis" to something like "In humans". This, by the way, suggests an idea for future expansion: "In animals", perhaps with pig, horse, and dog subsections.

• I'd suggest turning the numbered list into straight prose. Each item in the list could be expanded to paragraph length, possibly by adding presentation material here rather than in a separate section.

• The lead of a Wikipedia article should be a summary or abstract of the main text sections and should not include material that is not developed in the main text. The lead as it stands is like the introductory paragraph of an essay rather than an abstract of an article. It includes that tantalizing statistic about 40 to 80 percent. More stats would be good in the main text sections. The 40 to 80 is pretty amazing. Please see WP:LEAD.

• It would be good to add images, illustrations, or charts if you can find ones that are licensed for use on Wikipedia.

• Citations should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and access date for web-based sources if this data is known. I note that some of the citations are correct, and some are incomplete. The complete ones use the "cite" family of templates, which is what I would recommend for the others. Please see WP:CIT. With two windows open, you can copy a template from WP:CIT and paste it where you want it in your article, and then fill in the blanks. That way, you don't have to memorize each of the footnote forms.

• I fixed a couple of minor errors, but I see more. A copyeditor would probably catch and fix these.

I hope these brief suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 06:36, 26 November 2008 (UTC)