User talk:SpaghettiPunch/sandbox

Article critique on Bacterial circadian rhythms

The article, while reliable in its information and neutrality, has much room for improvement. This article can be claimed inactive as the last conversation on the "talk" page happened 8 years ago and only 3 edits have happened within the last 3 years. With such inactivity, most of the subtopics, like the Molecular mechanism of the cyanobacterial clock topic, are outdated and new information could be incorporated as most of the references cited on this article were published before 2010. The references cited in the text have sources that can be easily found in the reference list at the bottom of the page. The article sources are correctly cited and come reliably from other articles that are archived in journals, no biases were found and no closed paraphrasing was detected. Some information that I believe should have been cited, were no referenced however; for example, the final sentence in the Adaptive significance topic finds itself without a source on the data that the suggested hypothesis was based on. The information is relevant to the article topic as it describes circadian rhythms specifically for bacteria, but the organization and writing of the article could be edited. For example, the Relationship to cell division topic isn't underrepresented, but could be integrated into the Adaptive significance topic. All questions in both the topic titles and the writing itself could be removed because the goal of Wikipedia is trying to gather information in one place and not to persuade or answer specific questions.

Kenny Hui 18:38, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

The article Gliding Motility in its current state cannot be considered a resource due to its lack of information and coverage by other editors. The two sentences written on the Wikipedia page, while relevant to the topic, feel out of place and utilize jargon not suitable for an introductory summary paragraph. The lack of research cannot be used to explain the lack of information in the article as the topic quite notable with new information being discovered even now in 2017 that focus on how motors in the inner membrane could transduce force to the cell surface. The information is not outdated in the sense that it is wrong, but dated in the way where there is now a lot of information that can be integrated into the page. In 2014, it was suggested that an internal clock may be at work when gliding occurs since motile cells were observed to glide a short distance and reverse directions in repeated intervals and in 2016, a key protein directly involved with the gliding mechanism was researched. The minimal amount of text on the page can instead be attributed to the low numbers of editors that have worked on this page as well as the task of starting an entire Wikipedia article by yourself. For my Wikipedia module, I plan to focus on editing the summary of the page to generalize what gliding motility is, how it differs from other types of transportation, the importance, how widespread it is, as well as introduce well studied bacteria that utilize gliding motility to travel. I chose to edit and rewrite the summary not only because it's the only information on the page, but because there would be no reason to start a specific subtopic on gliding motility until the basic information has been presented. Most readers would not understand the jargon presented in those subtopics and would not even understand what gliding was before they are tackled by the plethora of protein names and mechanism involved. This edit may benefit the page because it would be full content being added to a otherwise empty page as well as alleviate the work and stress of other editors that may want to work on this article, but are intimidated by starting a page by themselves.

-Kenny Hui 00:46, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Peer Review
Good job developing this stub into a really informative article! I’d like to mention a particular few of your choices that were good. Firstly, you outlined the differences between gliding and twitching motility as well as mentioning the unique elements of the former’s mechanism which make the content more interesting and highlight its notability. Secondly, you structured the article well, going from summary statement to gliding motility in the context of other motilities to specific examples and then a comparison of those examples. This order helps contextualize and give importance to what I’m reading about by building on the previous sentences. Lastly, your writing style adheres to Wikipedia’s standards pretty well. Your writing, while technical, avoids using a dense syntax and is comprehensible to anyone with introductory biology knowledge by avoiding advanced jargon. Just a minor grammatical correction though, the semicolon after “but while gliding motility is smooth” should be a comma since you open with “but”.

There a few improvements that you could make to your article. For accurate content, you should consider how specific your descriptions are; in the first sentence and few others, you describe gliding motility as bacterial translocation and/or a bacterial phenomenon, but later describe it in Apicomplexa, a eukaryote. Secondly, I suggest citing which source describes Apicomplexa and Myxococcus xanthus as “the most well studied organisms” in researching gliding motility. This relatively subjective claim doesn’t fit Wikipedia’s neutral style if unsubstantiated by a reliable source. Finally, I would also recommend diversifying your sources since references 4 and 5 are both lead-authored by Beiyan Nan and 2 and 3 are lead-authored by L. Sibley (I understand that you didn’t add #2). The sources should be from multiple, separate authors/groups so that the subject qualifies as significant.

Uh0hN0 (talk) 04:48, 9 November 2017 (UTC)