Talk:Human genetic variation/GA1

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Looie496 (talk) 19:45, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Starting review
Having looked over this article, I think there is a good chance that I will ultimately not pass it -- it's pretty far from GA in its current state -- but because it's such an important article I'm willing to spend a significant amount of time on it. Let me begin by discussing the lead.

I feel that in an article on this level, the lead should be accessible to an educated high school student. The first paragraph, which is the most important, is well short of that right now. It is full of jargon and contains little actual information.

I would like to see the lead include the information that the human genome consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, each containing between 47 million and 247 million pairs of nucleotides, plus much smaller amounts of mitochondrial DNA, for a total of more than 6 billion base pairs. The genomes of two randomly selected humans of the same sex will differ at only about 0.1% of these sites, but this still comes to 6 million different base pairs. The lead should also summarize the types of variation that occur: SNPs, CNVs, and so on.

Concerning the Africa paragraph of the lead, it is hard to understand and seems to me to lack the most important information, which is that the range of variation within sub-Saharan Africa is larger than for the rest of the world together, and that this fact can be explained by the out-of-Africa hypothesis, which says that all non-African populations emerged from a brief migration of a limited number of people around 60,000 years ago.

There will be a lot more, but I'd like to see how much progress we can make with these initial points before carrying on. Looie496 (talk) 19:45, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I have notified User:Wobble that the lede will require modification but that account appears inactive. --Maklinovich (talk) 21:50, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I would like to withdraw my Good Article nomination without a decision and instead request WP:Peer review. --Maklinovich (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't have any way to make the nomination go away, so I'm going to fail it, but the article can be renominated when it is ready. Looie496 (talk) 04:00, 2 February 2011 (UTC)


 * "I would like to see the lead include the information that the human genome consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, each containing between 47 million and 247 million pairs of nucleotides, plus much smaller amounts of mitochondrial DNA, for a total of more than 6 billion base pairs."
 * I disagree. The article is about human genetic variation, the information you suggest can be found in a general article about the human genome, it is not per se relevant to variation (excepting perhaps the comment that about 0.1% of nucleotides vary between individuals though this is only one way of measuring variation). This article should expand upon that sort of more general information that is contained in more basic articles.
 * "The lead should also summarize the types of variation that occur: SNPs, CNVs, and so on."
 * Possibly, I believe it used to do just that. But remember this article is about human genetic variation, it is not about variability. There's an important distinction there. Human genetic variation is about the variation that occurs between the genomes of humans, between individuals and how it is distributed over the world. Genetic variability is about how different parts of the genome change, that is the mechanisms of how variation is acquired, it is not specific to humans, and it has an article Genetic variability. SNPs, CNVs, indels, transposons, STRs etc. are not unique or specific to humans. We should not conflate these two things, they are very different in science. For example variability is important in gene function and in different diseases (for example gene amplifications and deletions (copy number variation) are important in some cancers). But genetic variation is generally used in population genetics or to determine family relationships. In medicine variation is more important to determine if certain diseases are more associated with some populations, rather than in disease progression.
 * "the Africa paragraph of the lead, it is hard to understand and seems to me to lack the most important information, which is that the range of variation within sub-Saharan Africa is larger than for the rest of the world together"
 * Seriously? Because when I read it I can see that it says exactly this very clearly: the population which migrated out of Africa only represented a small fraction of the genetic variation in Africa, and that this is a contributing cause of the observed lower levels of diversity in all indigenous humans outside of Africa.
 * "The first paragraph, which is the most important, is well short of that right now. It is full of jargon and contains little actual information."
 * What? Let's take a look at how much information it contains.
 * Human genetic variation refers to genetic differences both within and among populations. definition
 * There may be multiple variants of any given gene in the human population explanation
 * No two humans are genetically identical.statement supporting definition WRT individual variation
 * Alleles occur at different frequencies in different human populations, with populations that are more geographically and ancestrally remote tending to differ more.statement supporting definition WRT geographic distribution of variation
 * Causes of differences between individuals include the exchange of genes during meiosis and various mutational events. explanation of causes of variation (variability), this does not contain a discussion of the various mechanisms of variability as per my distinction above between variation and variability.
 * Natural selection may confer an adaptive advantage to individuals in a specific environment if an allele provides a competitive advantage.
 * Most mutations do not appear to have any selective effect one way or the other on the organism.
 * discussion of the effect of selection on variation, distinguishing between neutral variation and selection. This is important because genes under selection are usually not considered good candidates in studies of population genetics.
 * The study of human genetic variation has both evolutionary significance and medical applications.statement about why we study it 


 * For a section that "contains little actual information", I think it contains a lot of relevant and factual statements. As for the "jargon", yes it's technical. It has to be, how can one write an article about genetics without using the language of geneticists? that, I believe is why we have links to other articles. If someone does not have the tools to come to this article and understand it, then they need to go and read some other article sand prepare themselves. We cannot write a sensible article about human genetic variation without including technical genetic language, that would be impossible, and would require the creation of an article that included all the content of all the articles that are about those technical concepts.


 * I think it would be more helpful if you explained why you claim that an introduction that is comprehensive, and explains exactly what variation is, and how it arises, is totally useless (according to you). Furthermore, you claim that the article should be accessible to an "educated high school student, well there's educated and educated. Some students will understand and follow the science, others will not. But we can't restrict an article that is about, let's face it, a very technical subject, to a Mickey Mouse level, or else we would not include anything of use.
 * From what I can see, your suggestions would actually remove any discussion about genetic variation from the lead whatsoever, and would become a discussion about


 * 1) The human genome
 * 2) Genetic variability
 * So we'd have an article about genetic variation that did not discuss variation in the lead. How does that make sense?
 * cheers Alun (talk) 08:53, 10 February 2011 (UTC)


 * To put it succinctly, as I see it human genome is primarily about what distinguishes humans from other animals at the genetic level, this article is about what distinguishes humans from each other at the genetic level. That's a question of enormous interest to a very broad group of people, and we ought to try to make at least the lede of the article accessible to as many of those people as possible.  Primarily that means minimizing as far as possible the need for background knowledge and vocabulary.  It isn't easy to write that way, but it can be done.


 * On a bureaucratic note, I "failed" the article because it had been nominated by somebody who had not been involved in writing it, and there was no sign that anybody was going to show up to deal with issues. Had the review continued, I would have been open to modifying my views.  I would also have been prepared to make specific suggestions for changes in wording or presentation.  At this point, though, it would probably be better to continue discussions on the article's talk page rather than in this review page, which is formally closed.  (A new review can be started at any time, though.)


 * As to why I said that the first paragraph is useless, it is because the use of technical terms is so dense that the only people likely to understand the paragraph will be people who already know what it is saying. It doesn't really matter if the facts are there, if they are presented in a way that can only be understood by people who already know them.  Even the word "gene" has a somewhat fuzzy meaning to most non-experts (just try to understand the definition that Dawkins gives in The Selfish Gene!), and a reader who doesn't have a clear picture of what a gene is, is going to get very little out of that paragraph. Looie496 (talk) 18:56, 10 February 2011 (UTC)


 * as I see it human genome is primarily about what distinguishes humans from other animals at the genetic level
 * In which case it should contain information on the number of chromosomes and the karyotype, no? Besides the human genome article should be about the human genome. you'd require a different article on the "distinguishing features" of the human genome.
 * this article is about what distinguishes humans from each other at the genetic level.
 * That's only one aspect of this article, the other aspect is what causes the variation we seen between peoples from different geographic regions. Human genetic variation is about inter-individual variation and bio-geographic variation. It's also about how we explain that bio-geographic variation, so do we see evidence of bottlenecks, or founder effects, is there genetic drift. What it's not about is the molecular mechanisms of variability.


 * That's a question of enormous interest to a very broad group of people, and we ought to try to make at least the lede of the article accessible to as many of those people as possible.
 * And I don't disagree with that. What I do disagree with is your claim that (a) this article should be about variability and the structure of the human genome (b) that it can be done without using technical language or an understanding of basic genetics before reading. It's a technical article. Take a look at the article on nuclear fusion, it doesn't start off by explaining atomic theory. By your rationale the nuclear fusion article should include the whole of the atomic theory article because some people who come to it won't know that theory and the "jargon" as you call it, that the theory relies upon.
 * But what irks is the out of hand unconstructive dismissal of others' work. If you want to make constructive suggestions, great, we should be working collaboratively, that's what Wikipedia should be about. But coming to an article, rubbishing it is pretty insulting.


 * I "failed" the article because it had been nominated by somebody who had not been involved in writing it
 * I really don't care. This is not about failing it, this is about coming here, not fully understanding the subject at hand, and demeaning other editor's work. You're not in charge, and you don't have authority here. If you want to participate in improving the article, fair enough, go for it. But if you only want to poke your head round the corner, shout insults, then run away again, then it's probably best if you don't comment at all.
 * Well, that's a misunderstanding, and maybe it's at the root of the difficulty here. This page is specifically a GA review, and in the GA process, one editor steps forward as reviewer, and that editor is in charge of the review.  The process is fallible, but that's how it works.  Normally a GA nomination should be made by an editor who has contributed extensively to an article and, by nominating it, has in effect volunteered to make an effort to address the reviewer's concerns.  That didn't happen here -- this was a drive-by nomination.  Usually I look for that and stay away from such things, but in this case I slipped up. Looie496 (talk) 17:19, 11 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It doesn't really matter if the facts are there,
 * Oh yes, because the last thing Wikiprdia is supposed to be is factual, right..... No wait, how's that right?


 * Even the word "gene" has a somewhat fuzzy meaning to most non-experts
 * This article is called "Human genetic variation", the article itself contains the word "gene". You now appear to be saying that every article about genetics should start with a definition of what a gene is?


 * I don't disagree that the lead couldn't be made more readable. And I don't disagree that if we could remove some of the technical language it would not help. I do disagree that the lead does not cover the correct ground. The content of the lead is about right IMO. If you want to discuss how to re-write the lead so it can be made more accessible, then I'm all for that. But that can't be achieved by making the lead about what a gene is, or discussing the basics aspects of the human genome. Otherwise the lead would need to contain all of the information currently in the gene article, and I don't see how that makes sense. The fact is that many Wikipedia articles do and must assume some background, or even a certain amount of specific knowledge from the readership. That must be a given. As a very wise person once said to me, Wikipedia is not a textbook. It is an encyclopaedia. Alun (talk) 11:06, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

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