Talk:Smallpox/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Garrondo (talk) 18:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I have taken a quick read of the article and it is great. I believe it is clearly above GAN, and there should be no important issues. Nevertheless I suppose the intention is to take the article to FAC so I will try to do a more in depth, useful, review as I have time (I myself have a GAN at a similar point). I also have to say that I am not a physician but a psychologist working in neurology research, so a I will not be able to check for accuracy, but I will for readership.

Some general comments:


 * The article is very, very long, and therefore horrible to load. While I understand that sometimes seems a good idea to have all content in a centralized article in this case it is probably worth summarizing and creating a subarticle of the history section. At this point even the history section by itself could pass a GAN!!!
 * To follow MEDMOS sections a "society" section could be created with two subsections: warfare and famous patients. (I would eliminate the and culture from the name per having warfare as subsection.
 * When finishing writing a disease article I find it useful to try to eliminate the name of the disease as many times as possible in the article: overuse is most of the times the case. I will probably be also a good idea to do it here: a first clear example from classification: There are two clinical forms of smallpox. Variola major is the severe and most common form of smallpox, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. Variola minor is a less common presentation of smallpox, and a much less severe disease, with historical death rates of 1% or less can be converted into There are two clinical forms of smallpox. Variola major is the severe and most common form, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. Variola minor is a less common presentation of, and a much less severe disease, with historical death rates of 1% or less

Lead: summarizes adequately the article and it is interesting. As minor comments:
 * It should be the most accesible part of the article: it would be a good idea to explain the meaning of Maculopapular
 * Specific date of death of the Ramses is probably not needed in lead: everybody knows that they are ancient...
 * 2 times year in the same sentence is not very nice. In er year during the closing years
 * In the last 2 paragraphs it is quite clear that it was a terrible disease. Maybe some of the numbers could be eliminated for the sake of simplicity... with half of them is probably enough to make the point. Similarly it is quite clear that numbers are stimations, so there is no need to say it each time.
 * Month of erradications unneded in lead (been bold and eliminated myself).

Classification Does a nice job classifying the disease subtypes according to symptoms.

Signs and symptoms
 * Orofaringeal and respiratory are not the same?
 * the virus seems to move from cell to cell: do not know much about virology, but this hardly seems an accurate description.
 * An explanation of toxemia?
 * bleeding into the skin: Sounds strange although it may be me since my mother-tongue is not English.
 * This form develops in perhaps 2%: perhaps sounds strange. In addition all paragraph is unreferenced.
 * In the early, or fulminating form, hemorrhaging appears on the second or third day as sub-conjunctival bleeding turns the whites of the eyes deep red. : Not sure I understand this sentence: too technical, akward wording, not clear meaning...

More to come...--Garrondo (talk) 19:35, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Comment Hi, hope you don't mind me dropping in uninvited. I've had this article on my watchlist and my "to-do" list to bring to GA/FAC, so I'm glad someone else has picked up the ball! I've dropped a number of cite needed tags to various places that need them. There's more citations needed in the "Famous sufferers" section, but the whole section needs to be written into paragraphs rather than isolated sentences. Let me know if you need help with finding sources Nergaal, I have access to a lot of literature on the subject. Good luck! Sasata (talk) 19:07, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I fully agree with comment above.--Garrondo (talk) 19:35, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Comment I rewrote and expanded this article way back in December 2007, with the intention of taking it to FAC. I've kept an eye on it over the years, but unfortunately real life got in the way and I never found the time to get it up to FA-caliber snuff. I am happy to see that it has now been nominated as a GA. A few notes: Please let me know if I can be of any assistance.--DO11.10 (talk) 22:52, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I spun out a LOT of the original history section to its own article already, but the History of smallpox article is a mess, perhaps if the history article were cleaned up some of the information in the main article could find a home there.
 * Most of the disease information (i.e. signs, complications, treatment, diagnosis) came from the CDC pink book (ref 18 in current version) or the AFIP (ref 4). If you are looking for citations for specific numbers they probably came from one of those sources.
 * The "sufferers" sections will likely require a lot of work. One suggestion might be to turn it into List of smallpox sufferers or something. For a similar approach see List of poliomyelitis survivors.


 * Woow. Lots of things to fix. I thought this would make a good GA when I read it. Shooting for FA would be a nice idea but I am not sure I have the time in the near future to deal with something like that. I will try to fix the issues listed here over the weekend. Nergaal (talk) 05:17, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Since the nominator will have time difficulties ammending the proposed changes and does not have the intention of taking the article to FAC in the near future I'll leave my comments as proposals for future improvement and a do a review only of GAC. If in the future this comments are fixed and anybody thinks it could be useful I will probably be willing to continue with the started review.--Garrondo (talk) 14:40, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * 1. Well-written: Yes: I (a non expert) followed it easily, and learnt a lot of a disease I did not know. As pointed above some technical terms should be explained in the future
 * 2. Factually accurate and verifiable: Yes: sources are of medium to high quality and most content is sourced.
 * 3. Broad in its coverage: Yes, although it may be too broad, as pointed above with the history section. I found the article to be quite demanding due to its very broad coverage
 * 4. Neutral: Yes
 * 5. Stable: Yes, although there seems to be some debate over image use.
 * 6. Illustrated, if possible, by images: Yes.