Wikipedia:Peer review/DNA nanotechnology/archive1

DNA nanotechnology
This peer review discussion has been closed. This is my first attempt at promoting an article to featured status, and I'm interested in any feedback that will help improve the article. There are two categories of feedback I'm especially interested in:

(1) What improvements do the article need to fulfill the Good article/Featured article criteria? Which level do you think it is closer to?

(2) Would a non-expert or even a member of the general public learn something from reading the article? How can the article be improved to increase its usefulness to the broadest audience?

Of course, any feedback is welcome and appreciated. Thanks! Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 05:52, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

I haven't gotten any articles to FA standards myself, so somebody else can give you a better peer review. I'm also no biology expert (only taken biology at the high-school level). However, I'll point out a couple things that stand out to me:
 * Quick glance by Reaper Eternal
 * Fundamental concepts : "Base pairing" is already linked in the lead.
 * Polyhedra : 1st paragraph has no footnotes.
 * Potential applications : Your comments on programmable matter are unsourced.
 * Materials and methods : Entire section is unreferenced.
 * External links : Gives the appearance of a linkfarm. Not all those links to labs are necessary. (See WP:EL for guidelines.)
 * Reaper Eternal (talk) 18:12, 16 April 2011 (UTC)


 * For the first item, my impression is that an article shouldn't be wikilinked more than once within a section, but this resets at each top-level section break. The next two items are easily fixable.  The fourth is a bit tricky, as I'm not aware of any methods-specific review in this field, so I'd have to either cite a primary source that used each method, or use more general sources like Current Protocols in Molecular Biology.  For the final item, I think that links to labs notable for working in this field are a useful thing to include; this field is small enough that the current list is already comprehensive.  It would be nice to have some objective criterion for inclusion though (e.g., they're mentioned in a review, or they already have a Wikipedia article).  Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 23:20, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Comments
 * This one can absolutely make it at FAC with a little attention to detail. I typically copyedit just before FAC, so that it will be fresh on my mind when it hits FAC, and I'll be happy to do that here.  I'll also keep an eye on this peer review, too.  Different reviewers at FAC are all over the map on rules for linking; a few will reject the article if terms are linked more than once anywhere in the text (although links in infoboxes are fine).  We'll just have to see when we get there.  You'll need one citation at a minimum per paragraph to non-primary sources.  For the EL links, do you have a secondary source that supports the notion that each of these labs is doing essential work? - Dank (push to talk) 02:40, 19 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks! If people want to play around with what gets wikilinked where, that's fine, as long as it follows common sense. Right now the more technical sections are primary source heavy, but the secondary sources already in the article cover all the statements made in those sections, so it's just a matter of matching the refs to the paragraphs.  Everyone linked in the History section is mentioned in the cited review articles&mdash;that section uses exclusively secondary sources&mdash;so that could be used as a lower bound for notability for external links.  (This would cover nine of the seventeen labs currently listed as external links.)  Also, five more have written reviews or papers which are cited in this article.  Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 04:08, 19 April 2011 (UTC)