Wikipedia:Peer review/Tay–Sachs disease/archive1

Tay-Sachs disease

• 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 April 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review in order to prepare it for nomination as a featured article. Although Tay-Sachs disease is extremely rare, it served a public health model. It was the first successful application of mass carrier screening in genetic testing. It is frequently a textbook case for students in human genetics and public health, and it is frequently discussed in fields like medical ethics and medical sociology.

Thanks, Metzenberg (talk) 23:27, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

RexxS comments

Please excuse me if this review is not of the highest quality as it is my first attempt at a Peer Review. I have some comments and questions for you to consider.

Good points of the article are:

• I found the article engaging and comprehensive, and the sourcing is high quality;
• There are several good quality and relevant images, adding to the understanding of the article.

However, you may wish to address the following:

1. Linking: Considering WP:OVERLINK, I suggest you link only the first occurrence of a term, unless it appears in widely separated sections. For example, in the lead, "ganglioside" is linked twice, as is "brain", within consecutive sentences. It would be worth checking for any other similar occurrences. It is recommended to avoid placing two wikilinks next to each other as this looks like a single link. For example, could you avoid British ophthalmologist Warren Tay and American neurologist Bernard Sachs in the lead? - in both cases that is three adjacent wikilinks. I would actually suggest that linking "British" to United Kingdom and "American" to United States are low-value links (i.e. those articles add nothing to the reader's understanding of TSD) and serve to dilute the high quality links like Bernard Sachs. The first step should be to consider dispensing with links of common words - or to places that we can expect most readers to be familiar with. Perhaps consider if the link of "Eastern European" to Eastern Europe adds value to the article?
2. Citations: It should not normally be necessary to cite the lead, as the parts of the article that the lead summarises will contain references anyway. Within the body of the article, consider whether you have distinguished sufficiently between facts which are common knowledge (and exempt from the requirement to cite) and less obvious statements which would benefit from references. For example, the introductory paragraphs in "Testing" have two cites, both related to Pre-natal testing (as far as I am able to ascertain), but cover far more; possibly the internal links are sufficient to verify that content, but hopefully you will examine the possibility that more references may improve that section. It is difficult to "step-back" when you are familiar with all the material, but you should pose yourself the question, "If I knew nothing about TSD or even medicine, are there any claims in this article that I am unable to verify?"
3. The lead: Ask yourself if the lead accurately introduces and summarises the main points of the article. I personally felt the lead over-emphasised the pathophysiology and said nothing about prognosis, but others may not agree with me.
4. Sections: There is a guideline at WP:MOSMED#Diseases/disorders/syndromes on section headings that you may already be aware of. May I suggest a section on Prognosis might be applicable? Should the section on "Mutations and polymorphism" be a subsection of " Etiology and pathogenesis" or perhaps " Etiology and pathophysiology" would be a better heading with pathogenesis, mutations and polymorphism within it? I'm interested in why you chose to put "Controversy over heterozygote advantage" as a subsection of "Epidemiology". Would it be more appropriate in its own section? Even though it's not suggested in MOSMED, a controversy section is not uncommon on wikipedia and may well be of sufficient interest to the reader to warrant that. Have you considered a "Society and culture" section? There is quite a bit of content in the "Historical significance" section (which may be over-long) that could be moved to "Society and culture" with more commentary on the social significance, rather than the plain reporting usually found in "History".
5. Images: The article is long enough to sustain the 15 images present, but I suggest that a few of the images are more decorative than informative to this article. For example, do the images Geneticcounseling.jpg, Blooddrawgenetics.jpg, and Genetictesting.png actually add to the understanding of TSD? I'd also like to see the captions of some of the other images expanded to amplify the parts of the article that they refer to. For example, why not make the point that Jewish immigrants made outstanding contributions to society (to refute the Reuter's quote) in the caption to Irvingberlin1948.jpg? There are good guidelines at WP:Captions in balancing the need for clarity with succinctness when writing captions; I've found that reading through that page helps a lot.

In summary, this article certainly seems close to being a good candidate for FAC and I have not really stressed sufficiently above how good it is. The criticism is essentially minor in comparison and you will need to pick through my comments to weigh any value they may have. In any event, I wish you the best in preparing for FAC and I offer you the opportunity to discuss with me any of my comments or suggestions if you wish. --RexxS (talk) 01:23, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I've responded to many of these suggestions, and I plan to look at them again. While I agree that the images are in some respects decorative, I think they are necessary in what would otherwise be dry subject matter. Furthermore, the images of genetic testing and genetic counseling (although decorative) are warranted, because Tay-Sachs disease played such an important role in the development of these fields. Metzenberg (talk) 05:30, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

RexxS writes: I'm interested in why you chose to put "Controversy over heterozygote advantage" as a subsection of "Epidemiology". Would it be more appropriate in its own section? Even though it's not suggested in MOSMED, a controversy section is not uncommon on wikipedia and may well be of sufficient interest to the reader to warrant that.

Once again, thanks for commenting here. I have expanded the Epidemiology section. I hope that the material I have provided makes it clear that this is really a historic controversy, not a modern one. The bottom line is that heterozygote advantage ended up on the losing side of all three of the great late 20th century controversies in genetics. Sometimes outdated scientific theories continue to receive press coverage and attention in popular science publications long after most researchers in the field have rejected them or lost interest in them. Heterozygote advantage is such a theory. To give this controversy its own section would be to give it too much weight. Metzenberg (talk) 01:35, 24 May 2009 (UTC)