User talk:Milena Kovacevic/sandbox

Bacterial Circadian Rhythms Critique
In general, much of the article lacks appropriate footnotes and references. For example, the lead section provides a comprehensible summary of bacterial circadian rhythms, but uses no citations and could be inaccurate. Citations need to be added for the uncited facts used in each section of the article. For the information that is referenced, appropriate sources are used, footnotes are present, and there's no evidence of plagiarism. For example, the author cites a published study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when summarizing that, “strains whose endogenous period matches the environmental cycle, out-compete strains whose period does not .” Also, the article should include other perspectives, as it focuses only on cyanobacteria, and does not present the opposing view that metabolism, not light, controls bacterial circadian rhythms, as found in other research. Another major issue with the article is the use of non-neutral language. For example, the author uses a value statement in the last paragraph of the Molecular mechanism of the cyanobacterial clockwork section by saying, “…the most spectacular being that…” This statement needs to be either removed, or changed to a referenced fact to make it neutral, since it is the author’s own opinion and is currently written to persuade the reader, which violates Wikipedia’s second pillar. There's a similar issue with the last paragraph of the Adaptive Significance section where the author states his own analysis from the referenced information; it needs to be removed as the article should only utilize facts from published sources.

Milena Kovacevic (talk) 07:07, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Reflection
It was difficult writing the evaluation. Lots of thought was required to decide what to look at and include in the critique, especially since the word limit was so small. It was also difficult to discuss everything I wanted, so some points had to be left out.

Assignment 2 - Halorespiration
The Halorespiration article was chosen to be improved as dehalorespiration is a topic of high notability. Much research about the process in different bacterial species has been conducted since initial discovery in 1990. There is significant coverage on the topic as there have been hundreds of primary research papers published during the last twenty-seven years, with some as recent as 2017, when a paper identifying bacteria capable of dehalorespiration in polluted marine sediments was published. Many of these papers are reliable secondary sources, independently published by reputable journals, such as Frontiers in Microbiology and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The article has many issues and needs improvement, as it's currently a stub despite its high notability. For example, the article only contains a lead, which provides a brief summary of halorespiration without describing the mechanism. It does not elaborate on any claims made, like its bacterial diversity, nor its environmental significance, which is important as halogenated compounds are common pollutants. As such, the article fails to include various aspects of dehalorespiration that have been significantly covered by published research, and is not an accurate representation of the topic. These aspects include the general process of dehalorespiration , its potential for bioremediation  , and the use of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as a substrate. These sections could be added to improve the article, making it more representative of current knowledge. Also, the article does not cite all of its claims and contains four references, which is insufficient and indicates that information is incomplete.

To help address these issues, I will add a new section named Process of Dehalorespiration that will focus on describing the process and its environmental significance. Reliable independent sources from peer-reviewed journals will be used to describe reductive dehalogenation and dehalogenases in dehalorespiration. It will briefly discuss its role in biodegradation of anthropogenic pollutants, particularly PCBs. The section will improve the article by helping readers to better understand dehalorespiration, and by using three reliable sources  to expand on the claims made in the lead section, making the information more complete and representative of current research.

Milena Kovacevic (talk) 06:13, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Chanel Trac's Peer Review
The structure logically places the Process of halorespiration after it is first introduced. The subheading about substrates effectively divides environmental significance from the process. A suggestion would be to include general attributes of reductive dehalogenation (eg. “halogen substituents are released as iron”) under the Process heading and to add a separate subheading for Types of Dehalogenation. This would better distinguish between the specific types and the overall dehalogenation process, since the section switches between the two topics and may confuse readers. The sentence “…important in the reduction of pollutants such as TCE and PCE…” should be moved under the more relevant Environmental Significance subheading to group it with similar information.

The content contains relevant and sufficient explanation of halorespiration well-supported by citations. It can be improved by explaining why PCE and TCE are examples worth mentioning and including examples of other pollutants affected by dehalorespiration. This will reduce the biased representation of PCE among pollutants. The section could reword “dehalorespiration is environmentally significant in bioremediation” to “is an important process used in bioremediation” to clarify how it is significant and present a more neutral fact rather than a conclusion.

The writing style includes a good flow of ideas, but can be more concise by repeating less jargon in consecutive sentences. For instance, ‘reductive dehalogenation’ and its two processes are repeated frequently. Some terms can be removed to make information less cluttered but still understandable.

The sources are reputable from scientific journals, but most references use two articles which may limit research perspectives the content draws from. More citations are required for general statements, such as “its potential applications are an interest of research” to improve article credibility. Information about compounds degraded by halorespiration besides PCE should be included to equally represent significant topics relating to environmental significance.

Chanely (talk) 03:43, 6 November 2017 (UTC)