User:Wpeissner/sandbox

Wikipedia’s Five Pillars
These five guiding principles are key to how Wikipedia works.

Wikipedia's Five Pillars:

 * 1) Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia
 * 2) Wikipedia has a neutral point of view
 * 3) Wikipedia is free content
 * 4) Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner
 * 5) Wikipedia does not have firm rules

Summary of characteristics of target article
Goal of the current course project is improving a Wikipedia article to a quality level between B and GA. In this regard, GA means "good article" and is a quality level that has to be confirmed by an official review.

For reaching the desired quality, the article should meet the following criteria:
 * 1) The article is well written, concise and clear, and readily understandable by a non-expert reader.
 * 2) Depth and quality of information as well as its presentation are approaching the quality of a professional encyclopedia.
 * 3) Structure and subtopics of the article follow established rules or guidelines of presentation in the respective field.
 * 4) Copyright laws are respected and plagiarism is carefully avoided. Content from external sources has to be summarized and presented in an independent wording and language. Simple rewording, or mere translation, without changing the structure and flow of the language are not sufficient for avoiding plagiarism.
 * 5) Primary research must not be reported. Instead, verifiable sources from secondary or tertiary literature have to be cited in a proper way, with inline citations and a list of references. Only facts regarded as common knowledge require no references. All other statements have to be supported by proper citations to verifiable sources.
 * 6) View points and opinions should presented from a neutral point of view. If multiple or even conflicting views exist on a given topic, each standpoint should be presented fairly with balanced weight and appropriate space.
 * 7) Images and graphs, with suitable captions, should be used where possible to illustrate the content.

Practicing citations
Wikipedia has four main types of citations: web, news, book, and journal. Let's create at least one example for each of them.

Web: As an example for a web reference, I would like to cite an entry in GenBank: The mRNA of the Dpb3 subunit of DNA polymerase epsilon of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae S288c is found in GenBank as NCBI Reference Sequence NM_001178626.1.

News: When would I want to cite the news? Maybe I would want to refer to facts compiled by CNN about Hurricane Katrina.

Book: OK, that's an easy one. The most obvious book to cite for this course project is certainly our textbook.

Journal: References to journal articles probably make up the largest group of citations in molecular biology-related Wikipedia articles. Often, review articles are cited, like for example a review on the concept of epistasis or a review on how epigenetic information is preserved during DNA replication.

Let me shortly add some explanation of the term epistasis: In genetics, epistasis describes the interaction between two (or more) gene loci such that the effects or consequences of the occurrence a specific allele in the first locus are modified by the presence of a specific allele of the other gene locus. In a quantitative definition of epistasis, the effect of two gene loci on a quantitative phenotype is multiplicative in the case of epistasis between those two loci, or additive in the absence of epistasis.