Wikipedia:Featured article review/Stuttering/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 removed 10:28, 6 November 2007.

Review commentary

 * Messages left at CIngre, Slp1, Tdkehoe and WP Psychology.

Stuttering was promoted 2 1/2 years ago. On 28 December 2006, I posted a long list on the talk page of items that needed to be addressed, and other editors agreed. Talk page commentary was recently added from (speech and language pathologist?) that "There are MOS issues as above, but it is also not a good summary of the state of knowledge in the field. There is a good deal of original research, (even COI) included, and important aspects are missing." I believe the COI may refer to the information about commercial anti-stuttering devices, sections which have grown in the article. Since I posted the need for review almost a year ago, little has been done outside of my edits. I prune an External link farm about once a month. There is an old referencing system that I don't understand and don't know how to repair (we need a script to update this to one ref style). There are three reference styles and an excess amount of trivia in the article (Stuttering in the Media). There is partial compliance with WP:MEDMOS (because I've been trying to clean it up). There are broad patches of uncited text and citation needed tags. The article appears abandoned and needs updating and cleaning up. Sandy Georgia (Talk) 16:57, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for putting this up for review, I had been planning to do it, but oh the business of life! I have very major concerns about this article in all areas. The easy ones to fix are the prose, disorganization, MOS problems. Less easy would be the properciting of the material already in the article, some of which is excellent and accurate. A lot of it isn't, however. I also note that large chunks of the article are copyrighted text from, though since I believe the owner of that website was a major contributor to this article getting release may not be a problem. The therapies section in particular is very weak, and appears to be written in promotion of the use of technical aids, which is not especially surprising given that the text was written by a company selling technical aids. A cursory look at one of the studies quoted in that section suggests it is not being accurately reported.  Other very prominent approaches, for example the Lidcombe program, are not mentioned at all. This article has a long way to go, I fear.--Slp1 00:47, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Are you saying a Usenet FAQ was the main source for this article? Oh my gosh, I shouldn't have waited a year to put it up at FAR.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:48, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I didn't even notice that it was from a Usenet, silly me! Yes, indeed, large chunks are from . My point about COI remains the same, however, since the "The author of the Stuttering FAQ" is one Thomas David Kehoe of casafuturetech.--Slp1 02:10, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, I see there's a conflict of interest notification at Tdkehoe's talk page; is there text that should be immediately deleted? I'm a bit stunned at how this article became featured ...  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 02:18, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Peer review/Anti-stuttering devices/archive1. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 02:31, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks to me that it was fairly decent little article when it was promoted, though a lack of citations of course and not up to today's FA standards. To be quite frank, a revert to that version would solve a lot of problems that I have, though it is probably too drastic a solution!  I am at a loss about what to do in the short-term. In my opinion, the weakest (for various reasons) are the treatment sections, especially the childhood treatment part, which contains unsourced original research and commentary as well as other problems as noted above --Slp1 03:07, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I was just contemplating a revert, but there would be a lot of repair work involved because of the old, goofed-up citation method, and retrofitting of citations would still be needed. I almost feel like no info is better than bad info, and it might be better just to delete anything iffy.  Are you an SLP? I've asked others to take a look, but I'm concerned you may be the only subject matter expert.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 03:12, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, *sigh*, I am an SLP: rather easy to guess, I fear, though I have generally stayed away from related articles since WP is my hobby (Coals to Newcastle and so on)! The sections that I consider especially weak are Incidence and Causes (the latter was definitely stronger in its former incarnation). Onset and Characteristics are OK. The treatments sections are very poor, with rather obvious cherry picking of efficacy data. It is these sections that I find to be really "bad info", though some of the actual explanations about the approaches are alright.  The rest is OK. If I was to do anything in the short-term it would to delete all the efficacy type stuff, but I am reluctant to do any deleting myself without getting other opinions, since I guess it could be said that I have a bit of a COI myself!--Slp1 12:26, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

- Referencing system. The Wikipedia help page for Links and references doesn't explain how to format a reference! If a standard referencing system is ever developed we should use it, but until then it's not worth the time to change to another, possibly non-standard referencing system.
 * See WP:FN; it's standard. The problem with the current referencing is that the numbers are random (not in order) and there are three different systems in use.  They need to be standardized to something.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:34, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Also see cite templates and citation examples. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:48, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

- External articles. The article is 76 KB (roughly twenty to thirty pages). Wikipedia articles are supposed to be under 32 KB (roughly five to ten pages). The solution I suggested some time ago was to set up a stuttering Wikibook, and then put links from each section of the Wikipedia stuttering article to the stuttering Wikibook chapters. This was vetoed because external links aren't allowed in the body of the article. My current plan is to set up a series of Wikipedia articles on famous people who stutter, stuttering treatments for pre-school children, fluency shaping therapy, anti-stuttering medications, anti-stuttering devices, etc. I've completed the latter article and it's being peer-reviewed. Copying these articles over to Wikipedia should be easy.
 * The readable prose is 45KB, within WP:SIZE guidelines; size is not a problem. Wikibooks isn't the correct place to create daughter articles; see summary style. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:34, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Now at 34KB after I moved some info out to daughter articles and removed some unsourced info to talk page. 50KB readable prose is the outside limit per WP:SIZE.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 00:12, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

- Treatments. I wrote the adult and childhood treatments sections. I agree that these need to be longer. I believe in evidence-based practice but when you try to write briefly about evidence-based practice you just get a list such as "treatment A is 76% effective, treatment B is 14% effective" and these efficacy statistics can be more misleading than helpful (as was noted). To describe an evidence-based treatment you need to describe all the details. Was it 76% effective in the short-term, or the long-term? In the speech clinic, or outside in stressful conversations? Etc. If we had longer articles about each treatment, then in the main article we could just have short descriptions without efficacy claims.
 * See Summary style, but there are concerns about the accuracy and sourcing. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:34, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

- Lidcombe. I intentionally didn't use "brand names" in the treatments section so the Lidcombe program is refered to as "direct therapy" in the pre-school treatments section. In a seperate article we could use "brand names," as I did in the anti-stuttering devices article.

- COI. Someone put a COI tag on the anti-stuttering devices section and I asked to have the section peer reviewed. The reviewer(s) said that everything was based on published studies in scientific journals and removed the COI tag.

- "the childhood treatment part, which contains unsourced original research and commentary as well as other problems as noted above." Please be more specific.

- "The sections that I consider especially weak are Incidence and Causes (the latter was definitely stronger in its former incarnation)." Please be more specific.--TDKehoe 01:29, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Re treatment sections: Fluency shaping therapy and Stuttering modification therapy approaches are the most common approaches, but the DAF section is more detailed and positive.  I don't believe the analysis is up to date and more importantly accurate... There is certainly more than one Stuttering modification efficacy study: I quickly found  Long- and short-term results of children's and adolescents' therapy courses for stuttering. Laiho, Auli, and Klippi, Anu from International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. Vol 42(3), May-Jun 2007,) which reports a positive outcome. And how about the "Stuttering Treatment Research 1970–2005: I. Systematic Review Incorporating Trial Quality Assessment of Behavioral, Cognitive, and Related Approaches" Anne K. Bothe, Jason H. Davidow,Robin E. Bramlett, Roger J. Ingham  American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 15(4):321-41, 2006 Nov whose meta analysis study doesn't include any studies of DAF (because the SpeechEasy studies didn't meet the quality standards for inclusion, including no control group)?  They found "that response-contingent principles are the predominant feature of the most powerful treatment procedures for young children who stutter. The most powerful treatments for adults, with respect to both speech outcomes and social, emotional, or cognitive outcomes, appear to combine variants of prolonged speech, self-management, response contingencies, and other infrastructural variables".  This conclusion is not reflected in the current article, which seems to imply that the best of all treatments is DAF. I note all this from the most cursory literature search: there are many other articles to find as well as up-to-date stuttering texts that would be useful as sources.


 * In the children's treatment section, there are several sections which are not referenced including the preschool and teenager sections. In the school-aged section there is  analysis that suggests that clinician-delivered treatments were unsuccessful when in fact the article abstract says "The results suggest that all three treatments for children aged 9–14 who stutter were very successful in the long term for over 70% of the group" (though there was a effect towards home-based and EMG (not computers BTW)) approaches.  The unsourced commentary I am talking about is "Parents should realize that school speech-language pathologists are trained to treat a wide variety of speech and language disorders. Many don't have training or experience with stuttering, and few specialize in stuttering. Many school districts are underfunded and school speech-language pathologists have caseloads of 40 or more children, seeing each child for perhaps twenty minutes twice a week, or even doing group therapy with several children who have different communication disorders. Parents whose child's speech isn't improving may want to consider additional treatments beyond their school's speech-language pathologist." These comments are also very US-centric as are the various "advice" remarks which I don't find appropriate for an encyclopedia in any case.


 * Incidence section contains an unsourced statement that "Studies in years past claimed that some countries had higher or lower rates of stuttering, or that some cultures had no stutterers at all. These studies are generally discounted now, although there are likely more adult stutterers in countries with less speech therapy." Needs sourcing as cursory search have other sources suggesting that different countries do have a different incidence (see ) for an example.  And of course there is the whole issue of incidence vs prevalence.


 * Causes: starts with an unsourced paragraph that stuttering isn't caused by emotional strain. Then there is a paragraph on genetics and neurological differences and then back to stress again.  What about learning theory, linguistic development challenges, or immaturity of neuromotor control, and maybe even the disproved left-right handedness and Wendell Johnson semantogenic theories? The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has a nice summary at  and they put more evidence on genetic factors than the article currently does.

Hope that helps.--Slp1 04:08, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Slp, I'm not sure how much time you're willing to commit to this; without a person knowledgeable in the subject matter, I don't see a way to salvage the article's featured status. Would you be willing to begin removing to a section of the talk page anything that is poorly sourced, unsourced, and not likely to be accurate?  I don't want to begin removing unsourced text, since I can't judge what is inaccurate, but if you remove patches to the talk page, they can be re-added if they are correctly sourced and rewritten.  The bigger problem is that, with this strange referencing mechanism, it's hard to work on the article at all. I suppose I could begin to manually convert the references (), but I'd have less work to do if you first removed the suspect patches of text.  I'd be willing to put in the days necessary to repair the refs if the article is salvageable; without subject matter expert help, I don't see that it is.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:42, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I left a query at the Village Pump (technical); I believe someone used to run a script that could update the referencing mechanism. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:52, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * There is a script for converting ref/note templates, but AFAIK not for html-coded cites like these. Gimmetrow 16:04, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Gimmetrow; sounds like I'll have to do it manually. I'll wait a few days to see if anything surfaces, and if not, put the article in use to convert.  In the meantime, upon closer examination, there are also a lot of prose problems, mostly words to avoid, weasle words, peacock terms and generally unencyclopedic tone, in addition to a lack of comprehensiveness in sections per WP:MEDMOS.  LOTS of work needed here.  I chopped a ton of uncited trivia to Cultural references to stuttering; current readable prose is 35KB, well within WP:SIZE guidelines, but a lot of new content is needed for 1b, comprehensive per WP:MEDMOS.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 16:46, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I could help a bit, but it looks like there's a lot more than the ref mechanism and lost cites to deal with. Gimmetrow 17:02, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid if more than one person worked on it, we'd just get in each other's way. I've come to the conclusion that doing the work is worth the effort even though the article is a wreck, because the article won't be fixed as long as other editors can't work on improvements because of the goofed-up referencing mechanism.  I'm hoping Slp will weigh in on what text should be removed, and after that, I'll put the article  for a long time, and chug away at it. If I get stalled, I'll certainly knock on your door for help :-)  Unless someone is willing to commit a month to restoring this article to featured status, the refs are the least of the problems, but they should still be fixed to make it easier for further improvements to happen.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 17:17, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

I converted the refs and recovered the lost refs. In addition to everything else mentioned, the prose needs serious attention, the WP:LEAD needs to be rewritten to a stand-along compelling summary, and there is both overlinking of common terms and underlinking of technical terms. Still lots of work to be done, but at least the referencing mechanism is in place. There is a lot of text cited to non-reliable sources; I removed what I knew to be obviously wrong or poorly cited to the talk page, but there is more to be done. There's also a mix of British and American spelling that needs to be sorted out. Sandy Georgia (Talk) 21:16, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I worked on the bottom part of the article and added ce tags, but stopped adding because the article is massively undercited and I didn't want to fact bomb any further. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 01:19, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * You've done a great job on the article citations. What a task!  As requested, I will try to remove what I consider to be poorly/unsourced, unsourced, etc stuff to talkpage sometime today, but won't be able to help with very much rewriting in the short-term as unfortunately I am super-busy at present and on top of that have very limited internet access for the next few weeks. Sorry about that.Slp1 20:01, 23 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Move to FARC, progress made, but article is still grossly deficient and that's probably all we can do, unless someone else pitches in. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 05:06, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Suggested FA criteria concerns are OR and referencing (1c), neutrality (1d), and general cleanup (2). Marskell 19:24, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

comment: I am feeling badly about this article and would like to do what I can to save it from demotion. I now have regular Internet access, but will have very limited time for the next week to 10 days, so wouldn't be able to do very much till then. I would be particularly motivated to do my part if others could work on the Stuttering and Society sections which don't really require any particular specialist knowledge or resources. Any volunteers?--Slp1 22:26, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Usually, FARC can be extended for quite a while if someone is willing to do the work. I've got travel pending, so can't take on a lot of work for a while yet either.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:19, 14 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delist All tags need clearing. DrKiernan 11:01, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Tony  (talk)  14:33, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Remove. Could be saved with a lot of work.
 * In the lead, I see three systems for marking "words as words". See MOS. Why is "cure" marked as such?
 * Copy-edit tag; fact tags.
 * "Classification" section woefully inadequate.
 * Choppy paragraphing in places.
 * The mean onset of stuttering is 30 months, or two and a half years old."—Do we need an equative here?
 * Poor writing in places: "With young stutterers, their dysfluency tends to be episodic ..."
 * "By age 14, the"—space?
 * Ranges: en dashes, please.

Comment- I would request some patience for making a decision about demotion. I have been, and am willing to continue to try my best to get this up to standard, with SandyGeorgia's help. But as you know, these things takes time! I think a week or two should do it, and in the meantime, feedback and suggestions (or even better practical editing help) would be gratefully received. The lead is certainly on the agenda, but will be last once the rest of it is written.--Slp1 00:24, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

On second thoughts, I think it is better to Delist. I will continue to work on the article, but it would be better for me, and for the article, to work more slowly and without time pressure and consequent stress (ironically the latter are often seen as a possible cause of stuttering!). However, as above feedback, suggestions and help would be welcomed --Slp1 13:43, 4 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Off it goes then. We can placed this in the "improved but not finished" category. Thanks for your work, Slp. Marskell 10:21, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.