Wikipedia:Peer review/Asthma/archive3

Asthma
This peer review discussion has been closed. This is a top priority article that was once a FA but it was taken away and is not B/C class. I think it is very important to have this reviewed to help all users learn where to start to fix it.
 * Previous peer review

Thanks, Peter.C  •  talk  01:27, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments:

General point: Judging by the edit history of the article, there seems to be a lot of edit warring going on. A detailed peer review is impossible unless an article is relatively stable. However, I can advise on some of the presentational aspects of the article, if restoration of FA status is the goal:-


 * Lead needs to be expanded so that it is a concise summary of the whole article. The lead should touch on all aspects covered in the article, without discussing them in detail. In general, citations of material should be in the main text rather than in the lead.
 * The "infobox" is presented in a style that was evidently accepted in medical articles some years ago, but which is completely incomprehensible to general readers. In my view it would be better to ditch the infobox altogether than to retain it in this form. I don't know what the Medicine Project's view is, but this cryptic presentation of information does not, I think, further the general aims of the WP project.
 * The "History" section, which already has an "expand" tag, should be at the beginning of the article rather than the end.
 * The "Research" section contains one piece of information which is not worth a section of its own. Either expand to a proper section ("Current research") or absorb into History.
 * Prose structure: far too much subdivision into sections and subsections, some of which contain a single sentence of information. In other cases the prose is chopped into very short paragraphs. Current FA prose criteria will require to have a better flow, organised into fewer sections and longer paragraphs.
 * Parts of the article are written in bullet-point format. This is deprecated at FAC; the material should either be converted into prose, or presented in a formal wikitable with appropriate commentary.
 * It may be worth perusing this essay, in view of the inevitable technical language.
 * Attention needs to be given to citation formatting. Some, e.g. 57, lack publisher information, retrieval dates are missing, etc.
 * The toolbox on the upper right of this page indicates one disambiguation link and several dead external links.

I hope these general points are helpful. I have no medical knowledge so I can't really suggest more. The most important thing is that a group of editors with knowledge and interest should start working together to improve the article. There is evidence of this happening on the talkpage but not, alas, in the edit history. Brianboulton (talk) 17:51, 9 November 2010 (UTC)