User:Jakodak/sandbox

The Five Pillars of Wikipedia define the essence of the enterprise. It is an on-line encyclopedia and thus provides ready and usually well sourced information regarding many notable subjects. Primarily concerned with facts, neutrality and objectivity are a premium. Free content and editing maximizes the number of people it can inform as well as the pool of people capable of contributing. In such a free environment, civility within the community is absolutely necessary to avoid chaos. Finally, no firm rules relies upon the notion that content will be provided by those most interested and informed and that any damage done will generally be rare and limited when it comes to any specific page.

Summary of Characteristics of Target Article

The quality leap between a Wikipedia article graded B and GA is cavernous. Thus producing an article between these two standards should be straight forward. B articles possess a defined structure that is readily understandable. They are well referenced and contain no obvious omissions or errors. Producing such an article may be no simple task, most of the creative heavy lifting is accomplished by this point, but it is still rough and the heavy analytical work still needs to be completed.

A GA article is much more robust. It is well written and reads much like a standard encyclopedia. It is very broad, verifiable, neutral in presentation, and if helpful, illustrated. Furthermore, there should probably be no on-going editing war. An article nearing completion should require fewer edits since most of the disagreements should already have been argued and settled. Stability is thus a good indicator of a transition from B to GA.

On Protein Folding

Scientists trying to predict subunit tertiary structure from primary structure use computer algorithms such as the Monte Carlo randomized algorithm. These computational methods employ an energy landscape picture of folding which emphasizes numerous microscopic movements and diffusive intermidate states. There is great variance in the time scale necessary for natural proteins to achieve a stable conformation and this ranges from a few microseconds to several seconds and even more.