Wikipedia:Peer review/Spinal cord injury/archive1

Spinal cord injury
This peer review discussion has been closed. This article is a high priority article for the medicine wikiproject and high neurology task force and needs lots of work for it to improve. I can tell by just giving it a quick look over that it will require loads of work and I am looking for recommendations on specific things that I should change about the article. All feedback is welcome!

Thanks, Peter.C  •  talk  03:43, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Comments from Cryptic C62:
 * The first thing I noticed is how heavily dependent the article is on lists. Lists should be used sparingly. "An encyclopedia should seek primarily to teach, and only secondarily to inform."
 * There are huge chunks of text (such as the Classification and Location of the injury sections) that do not have footnotes. Yikes!
 * The tone of the article is, in some places, unencyclopedic. Here's an example: "One can have spine injury without spinal cord injury."
 * The How Occupational Therapy Can Help Address Occupational Performance Issues seems to be written like an advertisement.
 * More images would be nice.


 * It is not made clear in the intro or the first few sections whether the scope of this article is intended to cover only spinal cord injuries in humans or in all animals. I would consider it fairly plausible for someone to be searching for information on spinal cord injuries in, for example, horses.
 * As with any science article, there should be a History section to discuss how our understanding of the topic has evolved over time. In particular, I would be curious to know when the link between spinal cord injury and paralysis was first established. Once this has been created, I suppose Research directions could become a subsection of it, though I also wouldn't mind leaving it as a separate section.
 * The complete/incomplete injury information should, assuming it can be verified with a reliable source, be moved to the Classification section.

I suspect you may have wanted advice on how to improve the prose itself, but I think it is best to wait until after the article has been sourced and restructured, otherwise we may end up rewriting the same material multiple times. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Comments from garrondo: Following sections proposed at the manual of style for medical articles would be a great improvement.
 * In this sense treatment and the two sections on occupational therapy should be combined, most probably into a section named management (recommended title for chronic problems).
 * Everything still under research in the treatment section should be moved into a "research directions" section.
 * Similarly there is wayyyy toooo much info on occupational therapy: some parts could be summarized, others moved to other articles, and others simply eliminated.

Bests.--Garrondo (talk) 16:21, 24 November 2010 (UTC)