Talk:Lipid bilayer/GA1

GA Review

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I am reviewing this article. Diderot's dreams (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Review status: on hold The article really is an excellent piece of work. It is well written, broadly, and clearly covers the topic, is properly referenced, is NPOV, has no original research, is well illustrated, etc.. It is a great upper division level treatise on lipid bilayers. But that is the problem: the article is too technical and too long for an encyclopedia article on lipid bilayers. It wears on the reader too much, especially the general reader, who may just want the basics.

I suggest summarizing more, and putting some (but not most or all) of the detailed information in sub-articles. Maybe the article could be 2/3rds of its present size. My first suggestion is the in depth analysis of characterization methods. And try to write more simply and directly when possible without losing ideas. (e.g. maybe the section should be called "Characterization methods" or "Characterizing lipid bilayers"). Lastly the introduction needs to summarize the article more. Everything discussed there shouldn't only be there, and most every section should have a mention in the introduction.

Anyway, there is a lot to praise in this article, even beyond good article criteria. I think it could easily jump straight past good article to featured article with these suggeted changes. Oh, there was a minor deal with the see alsos out of place, but I've moved them.

Diderot's dreams (talk) 05:34, 21 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the review and feedback. I definitely intend to go back and do some more work on the intro, so it's good to hear some concrete ideas on what is needed. I also intend to trim the article some more, especially since I have more detailed versions in the sub-articles. I've found it challenging to decide what level of detail to keep, though. Some of the sections like mechanics are intrinsically technical. I certainly could include lower-level descriptions of the subject matter, but I'm not sure what the target audience would really be. I sort of feel like anyone interested in the mechanical properties of bilayers would be willing/able to approach the subject at a more advanced level. But maybe that's not a good assumption. What are your thoughts?

The other area where I found myself running into this issue was in the very bio-specific sections. It's hard to write an accurate/complete description without including sort of obscure terminology. Would you be willing to go through some of the sections with me and give a more detailed description of what you think should stay or go and how I might alter the tone? Thanks again for your time and help. I'd love to continue working on this to bring it up to FA. MDougM (talk) 02:48, 23 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've done some copyediting to give you some specific examples of simpler wording. I think now that a basic explanatory sentence or two at the beginning of the major sections help would be a good idea for the basic reader and makes it easier to go from there, and I tried to add them. Erudition and complex structure used in general as much as specific terminology wears down the reader. Many of the technical terms just need to be there, and I think it is harder to simplify wording as you get more into the details. I am not totally happy with my new prose's style, but you can see that the information is clearly portrayed, and it really says the same thing as the old prose.

As for reducing some sections by getting rid of information, just summarize subsections in a couple of sentences and eliminate the subsection. I'll try this myself if I have time. Diderot's dreams (talk) 17:05, 24 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Notes and What's left to do

I have done some condensing of the Characterization methods section and put the old text on the talk page for your use. Oh, my advice about how to reduce a section should have been prefaced by if you can't think of anything better, which I think both of us have.

As for article size, it's ok to be a little larger than I recommended before. There's a lot of references here, and they aren't part of the main body and read by the reader. So maybe 3/4 rather than 2/3 of the original 88K.

The last thing is the introduction. It still needs to summarize most every section. And that should do it!

Diderot's dreams (talk) 05:44, 26 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am going to close the review over the weekend and give a final evaluation, so please finish any changes by the end of Friday. Thanks! Diderot's dreams (talk) 15:12, 3 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

After reading the article again and getting a word count with MS Word, I think you guys should know I think the article is now clear enough and short enough for GA. And I've added a paragraph summarizing the left out sections in the lead. That makes 5 paragraphs, so the lead still needs some condensing to make 4 paragraphs, which I'll leave to you guys. Diderot's dreams (talk) 16:43, 3 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads up. I've gone through and made a few more minor changes. One of these was to incorporate the parts you added to the intro. So at this point it's four paragraphs again, but still rather long. I've trimmed it in a few places and it's now about the same length as the intro for Action Potential, but that is one of the longer ones I've seen.

I've looked around at some of the featured articles on similar topics to get an idea of how to address this. Looking at DNA and Enzyme for instance, they actually don't mention several of the sub-sections. The DNA intro doesn't mention chemical modifications, recombination, evolution, technology or history. Instead, the inro focuses on clearly expressing the basic concepts. I can see the merits of this approach, since I think most people who are only going to read the introduction would be better off having a good idea of what DNA is rather than a lot of individual facts about its properties or applications. I think the same is probably true for lipid bilayers.

So, basically, what I'm saying is that I don't think the introduction can be shortened much more if it's to retain references to each section. I'm sure I could trim a word here or there, but overall I think it will lose cogency if I try to compress much more. On the other hand, I'd be happy to try to shorten it by removing some of the information such as the single sentence (or sub-sentence) references to some of the sub-sections. I can see the merits of either format. Thoughts? MDougM (talk) 06:48, 4 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

First let me say I think the lead is short enough as it is now. It's a long article so the lead is a little long too. Good job.

I think including almost (and I do mean almost) all sections is always doable and important. For example, those two sentences I added killed three birds with two stones. And they went well together one topic to the next. I don't really think they were isolated facts, but relevant to the story. As a last point: the leads are going to be used as the articles in the upcoming print version of Wikipedia.

There are also other ways of handling the basics besides in the introduction. A short first section on the prerequisite science with a bent toward making it applicable to the subject, e.g. one about "Intermolecular forces and membranes" could be created (not that you need to, just a hypothetical).

I don't know why those articles you mentioned skipped sections in the lead. You might want to look at the articles when those articles were passed as GAs (not FAs). It could also be that the reviewer thought it appropriate to make an exception, which is allowed because of the loose structure of our rules (the Manual of Style is in fact a guideline that says you can make exceptions), it is just against my editorial judgement. It's also possible that less constructive reasons were the cause for making an exception. Maybe their wikifrends from the same wikiproject did the GA (that's a GA no-no, but I've seen it recently and I wonder how common it is), or that the person was so impressed with the scientific knowledge or academic credentials of the writer that they were cowed over.

Anyway, I'm going to give the article another look over later tonight and see if I can pass it as I think you've satisfied all my holds. Diderot's dreams (talk) 03:44, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Final GA Review status

Congratulations! Lipid bilayer is now a Good Article.

The objections that had this article on hold have been sufficiently resolved, and having all the other requirements already fulfilled, I am happy to promote the article. Well done to all who worked on the article, especially MdougM.

It's the last task of a reviewer to add suggestions for further improvement. I sound like a broken record, but I would continue working on simplicity of expression and the length of the article. I think there is still more that can be done, especially article length. Though I think it's short enough to pass for GA, it still needs work for ideal transmission of knowledge-ability. Anyway, these two things are the perennial bane of scientific articles, so I hope you will keep them in mind in your future work.

There is one other thing, which is something you may not have noticed. The page takes 1.7MB of data to load. This is fine for high speed connections, but about 15% of Americans still connect with 56K dial-up, and probably more throughout the world. So we've got to get that down. The problem is that several pictures with repeated molecules are saved in vector format (.svg). If they are resaved in pixel format (.png) their sizes will come down a lot.

Anyway I have one more thing to do, but it's getting late and I'll take care of it tomorrow. Diderot's dreams (talk) 05:35, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Great! I'm glad to see it passed. Thanks for taking the time to review the article and advise me on the revision process. I think it's a much stronger, more readable piece now. I'll definitely keep looking into brevity and clarity to improve it further. Interesting point about the size of the article; I hadn't really considered that. It's my understanding, though, that all svg graphics are remotely rendered into png before being sent along with the page load. So I'm pretty sure that all graphics are already being sent as png. At least that's what they save as when I right click save them from the loaded page. Also, the original svg versions are several MB each. Now, that being said, two of the graphics (AFM and pore structure) account for nearly 1/5 of the total page size. I'm guessing it's because they have a lot of gradients, which png isn't good at compressing. Do you think it's worth making jpeg versions of them? That will cut down on the size significantly but, of course, it's a lossy format and not scalable. Anyway, don't worry about it if you don't have a strong opinion on the matter. I can query one of the image message boards for suggestions. And thanks again for helping to get everything in final form. MDougM (talk) 18:26, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, you're right about them being png. And I think it would be a good idea to save those big ones as jpegs. The article text does load first and in a few seconds for slow internet connections, but it does take several minutes for the pictures. So why not give it a try. Diderot's dreams (talk) 04:34, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, jpegs are a poor choice for line diagrams, since it is a lossy compression method. See Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload for more details. Tim Vickers (talk) 17:25, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]