Wikipedia:Featured article review/Helicobacter pylori/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was kept by User:Marskell 14:19, 8 September 2008.

Review commentary

 * User:AxelBoldt, WikiProject Microbiology, User:TimVickers, User:GrahamColm, User:Jfdwolff notified

I am nominating this Featured Article for further review. The Pathology section is one sentence and is tagged for improvement. The writing is no longer FA quality. It is very poorly referenced. For an article on this particular bacteria, I'd expect to see twice as many references as are there. Moreover, many of the statements just aren't referenced. The external links are way overboard (I know that's a judgement call, but it reads like a link farm). Therefore, I would say this article is no longer well-written, properly sourced, or consistently structured. It needs a rewrite before it is FA quality. Orange Marlin Talk• Contributions 02:07, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Agree - the prose contains some odd constructions and word usages in places. Luckily this is fairly straightforward and I have started tweaking it but there is a way to go yet. It would be good to save such an article. The references need proper formatting and more definitely need adding. Also, I suspect a little more could be added on the bacterium itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Casliber (talk • contribs) 23:07, 1 August 2008

I have to go for now but I'll be back with more. delldot  talk  14:37, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Mostly a great article, a pleasure to read. But I do have some comments, and think it merits another look.
 * Short lead.
 * I find this sentence to be confusing: H. pylori's helix shape (from which the genus name is derived) is thought to have evolved to penetrate and favor its motility in the mucus gel layer. Penetrate what?
 * from mucosal specimens from human stomachs Could this be put into plainer language?
 * The paragraph beginning Before the appreciation of the bacterium's role is unreferened.
 * is that is produced by other intestinal bacteria correct (i.e., is H. pylori considered intestinal)?
 * Some of the info under Structure is not about structure (e.g. the oxygen material).
 * The apparent contradiction brought up on the talk page about the reduced stomach acidity should be explained or addressed.

The unreferenced section had been added after the FAC, it was a repeat of info covered more in the previous section, Colonization, so I integrated it into that section. More later. delldot  talk  17:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * More comments:
 * Under Colonization:  An example of this is the Lewis b antigen. An example of what? Possibly  An example of such an adhesin?

I've removed the experimental treatments in the Rx section; I think that section should discuss only established treatments. Those could be included in a Research directions section, but not by themselves. I removed the unbalanced tag, as I thought that fixed the problem. Re-tag if not. More comments: More to follow. delldot  talk  20:03, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Heavy reliance on primary sources. Reviews should be found to replace these where possible.
 * While some favorable evidence has been accumulated, the theory is not universally accepted -- not really clear what this refers to. Also, this paragraph flows poorly from the last one.  Why am I suddenly reading about cancer?  How does it relate to the rest of the section?
 * Even biopsy is dependent on the location of the biopsy. -- Choppy, awkward sentence.
 * The info on rates of infection in the West and Third World should go in an Epidemiology section, not diagnosis.
 * Define unfamiliar terms like atrophic.
 * Refs should be consistent: periods after authors' initials, capital letters in article titles, full page range (4888–4891) or abbreviated (4888–91), periods after abbreviated journal titles (Aliment. Pharmacol. Ther.) or none (Dig Dis Sci).
 * All instances of the genus & species name should be italicized.

More: That's it from me. delldot  talk  20:45, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * It has been proposed that H. pylori induces inflammation and locally high levels of TNF-alpha and/or interleukin 6 -- perhaps explain the difficult terms, e.g. locally high levels of the inflammatory proteins TNF-alpha and/or interleukin 6. Also, and/or is discouraged by MOS.
 * Acid reflux and esophageal cancer is a tiny subsection all by itself. I'd get rid of it, but it's referenced above with an "explained below".
 * The last paragraph under Genome studies lost me. Any chance of making it less technical or explaining difficult terms?
 * Bacterial strains that have the cagA gene are associated with an ability to cause severe ulcers doesn't make sense.
 * I would suggest a restructuring of the article, with two main parts: the first half should be about the bacterium itself (e.g. structure, genome studies) and the second part about infection. If we change Colonization to Colonization and infection, we could convert Causes of infection, Diagnosis of infection, Treatment of infection to lvl 3 headers: Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment (the cancer section would also be a level 3 under Infection).  On the other hand, this would be a massive section.
 * I'm not sure about the comprehensiveness. So 2/3 of the world is infected?  In that case, what are the usual characteristics of infection?

Here are my issues:
 * Lead is too short and does not summarize the whole article.
 * Citations are done improperly, although I've fixed many of them.
 * References are lacking from a number of statements.
 * Prose is difficult to read. There are too many areas where repetition has occurred.
 * The treatment section gives too much weight to natural treatments that are far from proven to do anything positive.
 * Editors have cleaned up the see also and external links section.  Those were a mess.

Hopefully more editors will get involved so more people will watch the articles. Orange Marlin Talk• Contributions 17:11, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Is there an MOS for microbiology articles? Orange Marlin Talk• Contributions 05:12, 3 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Images: I took a quick look at them, added info tags etc. I think everything is ok, but I'd prefer someone more experienced with images take a look at
 * Image:Helicobacter Pylori Urease.png as it is showing Protein database as the source with the note of Online and printed resources are welcome to include PDB data and images from the Structure Explorer pages, as long as they are not for sale as commercial items themselves. Does that eliminate wikipedia requiring only non-commercial. I've also uploaded the en.wiki copy on top of the commons copy as they were two marginally different files uploaded.
 * Image:EMpylori.jpg and Image:Pylorigastritis.jpg are showing as Copyrighted free use from http://info.fujita-hu.ac.jp/~tsutsumi/index.html. Are we to assume based on the upload or that this has passed FA in the past that this is legitimate. I don't see anything on the website to expressly indicate a PD release or any indication of an e-mail. -Optigan13 (talk) 05:13, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Minor procedural note, can you post who you notified. I can't tell anymore since the FAR has already generated a bunch of edits. -Optigan13 (talk) 05:38, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Comments It's not a bad article but it is below the current FA standard. As mentioned above, there should be more, (up-to-date) citations. There are problems with the structure; the section headed Microbiology, is in fact a discussion on pathogenesis and there is little microbiology in the article. There is a bad error of fact in the all too short lead: H. pylori does not infect more people than any other bacterium, and the reference given does not support this claim. The article needs to make clear the important differences of bacterial colonisation, asymptomatic infection, (carriage), and symptomatic infection. Many more people are infected with Staphylococcus aureus than H. pylori. There is some poor prose too, in the History section for example: The community began to come round.... And, that image of the urease structure is purely decorative. The article can be rescued, but someone needs to spend a lot of time on it. Graham Colm Talk 14:52, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Suggested FA criteria concerns are prose (1a), referencing (1c), and structure (2). Marskell (talk) 10:25, 21 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Delist per nom. Very many problems with structure and references. Ten Pound Hammer  and his otters • (Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP) 04:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Several editors (some I've not seen about these parts) have cleaned up the article. It should stay.  I'm going to remove the reference tags, as soon as I complete a review of each citation.   Orange Marlin  Talk• Contributions 03:04, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Article has been substantially cleaned up. I'm going to reiterate my opinion here.   Orange Marlin  Talk• Contributions 23:04, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Delist - agree with . There are still some style issues as well as referencing issues throughout that have not been addressed. Cirt (talk) 21:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Still lacking a lot of citation, and no Signs and symptoms section (per WP:MEDMOS). Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 00:52, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how to respond to that. We keep running into articles like this one, and how to fit it into MEDMOS.  H. pylori is a bacterium, so the article describes the bug, not the disease that results from the bug.  So maybe the article on ulcers refers to H. pylori, and it would be styled according to MEDMOS.  Or do we describe the disease too?  I ran into this situation with Chickenpox (the disease), and Herpes/Varicella zoster the virus.  Do we combine the articles?  Do we separate them?  Does one follow MEDMOS as the disease and the other basically an anatomical/genetic/physiological description of the disease vector.  And let's not even go to something like malaria!!!  So, I guess I need to ask, do we do a signs and symptoms of the disease that results from H. pylori (speculated to be ulcers), or do we have a microbiology article about the bacterium, with a section discussing how it might cause ulcers?  I'm getting a headache.  BTW, my idea has always been to combine the articles on the vectors for the disease and the disease.  So Herpes zoster and shingles would be combined.  Varicella zoster and chickenpox would be combined.  In these cases the virus causes one disease, and the disease has one cause.  H. pylori may cause ulcers, but I don't believe all ulcers are caused by H. pylori.  Wow, this is giving me a serious migraine.   Orange Marlin  Talk• Contributions 08:03, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I was actually going to write something similar to above this morning - it is tricky as the bug gives rise to several disease entities. OM has been busy with AD so has a good reason to have been preoccupied. Shall we give it another week? I have an idea. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * There has been significant clean-up of the article. I'd say in a week or so, maybe we could discuss whether the article meets FA standards or not.  I think it's "coming round"...I need to find that bit of prose and beat it to death.   Orange Marlin  Talk• Contributions 03:49, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep I have made a few edits, . The prose doesn't flow very well in parts but this is difficult to achieve when describing loosely related characteristics of the species, but the article has been much improved over the past few weeks. Graham Colm Talk 16:26, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I've given this a copyedit and done some MOS cleanup. Maralia (talk) 16:05, 4 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm catching up from travel; if Marskell will allow me a few days to catch up, I'll peek in later. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 05:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep, looks good to go now. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:24, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.