Talk:Persistent stapedial artery/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 07:19, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this article is currently too far from the GA criteria for a full review. Having said that, I really appreciate your enthusiasm in working on and nominating this article. As someone who's worked on and brought to GA status several articles on rare medical conditions, I'll give some advice on this article's current issues and avenues for improvement.

The first, obvious thing is that the article is very short, enough to bring in serious questions about the "broad coverage" element of GACR. Rare disorders will obviously have shorter articles than common and well-understood ones, but another thing that stands out is that the prevalence given for persistent stapedial artery is not that rare. The high-end estimates are in the neighbourhood of 1/200 -- this is pretty common, so far as these things go! Repeatedly contextualizing it as an 'extremely rare disorder' misleads the reader, as the estimated prevalence range is not mentioned until the very end of the article. (Another issue: a very broad range is given, with little indication as to what's most likely to be accurate, given from a single source and presented in the relatively unintuitive manner of percentages rather than fractions.) A 1/200 disorder will generally have a significant body of literature around it and substantial room for article expansion; even a 1/5000 disorder, to take the low-end estimates, should have quite a lot of expansion potential. For comparison, XYYY syndrome is a GA twice the length of this article for a disorder with eight recorded cases. Pentasomy X is about 3.5x the length of this article, and has a prevalence somewhere between 1/85k and 1/250k. You cite quite a few sources here -- you have a lot of room to grow!

As well as the significant issue of the prevalence being represented in contradictory ways, there are some other parts where things aren't well-contextualized, making it hard for the reader to follow. For instance, while the disorder is clarified as usually asymptomatic, various symptoms are listed, and there's no clear suggestion of how common these actually are. This is really important for medical articles, if you can get it -- readers want to know 'how big a deal it is', and right now, it's hard to get that from the article.

There are also some sourcing concerns here. This is tricky for rare disorders, as many rare disorders just don't have the literature reviews that MEDRS assumes must exist, and primary sources supplement them. However, given this is fairly common by rare-disorder-standards, it stands out to me that you use so much primary sourcing without contextualizing it. I notice this around cite 4 in particular, where you seem to be citing some general symptoms to a case study.

I hope this helps, and I'm looking forward to seeing improvements to the article. While it isn't ready for GA yet, I still appreciate the work you've done and the willingness you've shown here to work in the medical topic area; many editors are hesitant to enter it, and I commend your efforts. Vaticidalprophet 07:34, 26 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you  X750. Spin a yarn? Articles I've screwed over? 08:13, 26 June 2023 (UTC)