Wikipedia:Peer review/Lipoic acid/archive1

Lipoic acid

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I've listed this article for peer review before offering it as a featured article, because of its high level of scientific knowledge and importance for the wellbeing of the general public. The article contains ridiculously long strings of citations, maybe these could be shortened so that all the cited articles of the particular string would be listed under a single citation number?

Thanks, Probios (talk) 15:37, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: Thanks for your work on this. While there is a lot of information here and it is clear a lot of effort has gone into this, I do not think the article would pass FAC in its current state. Here are some suggestions for improvement.

A model article is useful for ideas and examples to follow - there are several FAs at Wikipedia:Featured_articles#Chemistry_and_mineralogy that may be good modelas, I think that Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide might be a pretty good model (though no model is perfect).
The Toolbox in the upper right corner of this PR has some useful tools, for example there are two disambiguation links and two circular redirects - see "disambig links"
The automated tips also are useful and include things like adding more wikilinks and images
It also points out that the headers do not follow WP:HEAD - do not repeat the name of the article in headers (the reader already knows that the article is about lipoic acid)
Per WP:CITE references generally come AFTER punctuation, and are usually at the end of a sentence or phrase
The references are extensive but some of them need more information - for example refs 150 and 165 to 167 now are just a URL. Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
I would also make sure that refs are formatted consistently - so all books should have linked ISBNs if known, or OCLC if not, journals that have Pub Med IDs should list those, dois should be used if known, etc.
As for the long rows of citations, I would either combine refs in some cases (so if there are a series of studies cited and if each of the refs is used just once in the article, I would consider one ref with all the sources), or perhaps using just a few review articles that contain lists of refs that the interested reader could look at. See Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and how it handles references - only 90 or so refs, all with ISBN or doi and PMID
Despite the 311 refs, there are some places that need a ref - one citation needed tag and places like this Japanese and German manufactured R/S-LA became available as a nutritional supplement in the US in the late 80’s and sales and use grew slowly and steadily throughout the 1990s as interest in antioxidants and free radicals grew due to recognition of the roles of reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species in health, disease and the aging process. My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref.
The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself - my rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. Please see WP:LEAD
My general impression is that the more technical the article is, the clearer and easier to follow the lead should be
Wikipedia articles generally do not have an Introduction section - that is the purpose of the lead.

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:06, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

RJHall comments: I started to review this page, but immediately found the lead and a good chunk of the text too technical for use in a non-specialized encyclopedia. The reader may be put off by the technical prose and so quickly loose interest. Please see Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable for ideas on how to make it more accessible. (Note that I don't mean that it should be dumbed down; just that the various concepts should be explained clearly for the lay reader.) Thank you.—RJH (talk) 17:14, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]