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Folding@home

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You may be looking for a different page: see discussion of sorting old archive errors here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:53, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's Disease, cystic fibrosis and other aggregation related diseases. So far, the Folding@home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range—a time scale thousands of times longer than was previously thought possible.[1]

As of November 9, 2006 45 scientific research papers have been published using the project's work.[2]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report on October 22, 2002 states that their distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.[3]

--Records 03:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


  • Object too many stub sections, references and bibliography needs to be merged and use in-line citations, the size of images, along with a bulky {{cquote}} makes it very hard to read. -- Selmo (talk) 04:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC) See comment below. -- Selmo (talk) 03:13, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What do you suggest be done to the article? In fact I would appreciate if you were to be bold and edit the article, please?--Records 19:26, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
My only intention is to provide my opinion about this article being featured and provide some problems with it. I'm not obligated to fix my concerns with it. -- Selmo (talk) 20:26, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


  • Comment Not bad. I'd like to see some points covered:
  • If I run the program while doing something else in my computer, does it significantly affect the speed of performance?
  • Is there any significant stastistical trend among people who allow there computer to use the program (for example, whether most of the users are chemistry/biology students)? (however, this data will be :*How does merely "contributing electricity" by Playstation3 would help the project?
  • Need to have more wikilinks to technical terms. For a person who does not understand computer lingo adequately, sometimes it is tough to read the article. For example, what is "450 X1900" GPU, or, what is "x86-64" Linux?
  • "...is measured against couple simple qualificators." - what is couple simple qualificators? Or am I missing some word?
  • WU=working units, right?
  • "With push to larger WUs and longer folding timeslices, the system speed is influencing more the possible porting decision than the possible system count" - hard to understand. Please elaborate. Also please wikilink System speed and system count.
  • How about a section on problems/bugs of the program? Is there any controversy regarding it's acceptability among the scientific community?
  • Why did not Google toolbar incorporate the program this time?
  • Lead needs slight expansion.
I think addressing these concerns would help some sections get rid of the "stubby" look as noted above by Selmo. Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 06:09, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I dont know can you be bold and fix it for me, please? --Records 19:41, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


  • Object it's great to see interest in this article, but it really isn't close yet.
  • Just in terms of the structure, the lead is too short and does not cover the article's content, there's a large and unnecessary blockquote, the referencing is mediocre (good that it exists, but all the inline citations seem to be to online sources/commentary rather than the published papers), and the linkfarm at the end needs cleanup.
  • In terms of content, this article has zero information on how the technique works (which is all published); to be a comprehensive article on the subject, it would need substantial descriptions of the algorithms and methodology, and in particular it needs to detail the justification for sampling many short MD trajectories rather than one or a few very long ones, which is the key that makes distributed computing work for these types of calculations. Similarly, the types of problems for which this technique works well should be explicitly pointed out and contrasted to those problems for which it fails because a long trajectory really is needed. There is no academic criticism of the method presented in this article either.
  • Lastly, as an article on an internet phenomenon, it's missing comparisons with the user base size of other distributed-computing projects (eg Rosetta@Home, SETI, the prime-number one, etc.) and could use expanded discussion of the 'work unit' model and the informal competitions that have developed between websites that encourage their users to join their 'team'. Opabinia regalis 07:22, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I dont know can you be bold and fix it for me, please? --Records 19:41, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


  • Object Personally, I find there's not enough detail on the process itself. It treats protein folding calculation as a "black box". This would be of great interest to the layperson, I suspect. Also there's no comment on similarities and differences to similar protein structure prediction projects and such. NB: the importance of the subject is not a a"featured article" criterion. Sockatume 17:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I dont know can you be bold and fix it for me, please? --Records 19:41, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Object - Nomination seems to be an attempt to get people to fix this article. That is not what FA is for. This was also listed at SCOTM where and a call for votes on the Folding@home forum was put out here. Nomination for FA should be withdrawn. pschemp | talk 01:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • (edit conflict) Object on procedural grounds. Please do not abuse FAC as peer review. Given your nomination of the same article for SCOTM, it seems you did not expect this nomination to succeed - if you did not know, SCOTM is for improving articles that aren't featured yet. Please do not leave sofixit demands on people's talk pages like you did here. Your behaviour here so far has been an absolute disgrace to your cause. Please do not use the Wikipedia community as a vehicle to further your own projects, especially not a remote-controlled vehicle! Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:18, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Concur with this editor. Discussion should be closed immediately and Records formally repremanded somehow. Disgraceful behaviour. Sockatume 01:28, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please, let's not WP:BITE. AZ t 22:35, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll bite spammers all I like thank you. pschemp | talk 02:36, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

== Updates ==

Are you going to apologise or explain your spamming? This article still isn't anywhere near FA quality btw. pschemp | talk 02:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

After this "explanation" I am totally opposed to this article being nominated. User continues to spam talk pages for his cause and has admitted personal gain motivations. pschemp | talk 03:6, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Speedy Object per the above. -- Selmo (talk) 03:13, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
User:Records had be blocked indef for admitting to be a sockpuppet of a banned user. Not to mention removing comments on this and other talk pages and general disruption. This FAC really should be shut down now. pschemp | talk 04:02, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Concur. Close the discussion, as this was obviously never FA material and the discussion, along with the listings on Collaborations and various other parts of the Wikipedia, was created for entirely dodgy reasons. Sockatume 06:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ "Validity of Folding@home" (Blog). Folding@home support forum. Stanford University. Retrieved 2006-11-12.
  2. ^ Vijay Pande (2006). "Recent Pande Group research papers". Folding@home distributed computing. Stanford University0. Retrieved 2006-11-12.
  3. ^ C. Snow; H. Nguyen; V. S. Pande; M. Gruebele. (2002). "Absolute comparison of simulated and experimental protein-folding dynamics". Nature. 420 (6911): 102–106. PMID 12422224. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |last-author-amp= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help)
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