Cystic fibrosis

[edit]

hmmmm this is so WEIRD —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.2.160.254 (talk) 02:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC) This is a former Medicine Collaboration of the Week. It's been entirely reworked and is fully referenced. We are working on obtaining more images and would appreciate it if anyone has a public domain chest x-ray of CF sitting around their hard drives! We would love to hear what everyone has to say about the article (aside from the known image paucity and current arrangement problems!). I am working on closing all red links in the next few days, as well. InvictaHOG 04:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Positives

Negatives

Suggestions

Nick carson 09:04, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the feedback! There's a lot to address here and to work on, it would seem. Is there some way to check the length of an article with certain parts excised? My past experience has been that external links and references add considerably to article length (I don't know if cite.php changes this!) and this article is actually much smaller than two other FA I've worked on (multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer) and closer to a third which had much fewer references (pneumonia)! It sounds like the structure is part of the problem from your comments on blocks of text and difficulty reading. The overall framework is taken from the medicine template and follows the goal for all medical articles. However, within each broad category there's obviously room for improvement! I'm interested in what you find to be unclear about the divisions - is it wording in titles, a need for more divisions, the order addressed, etc? Offloading subsections is something that has been used to great effect in other medical articles. However, I'm afraid, at least for the symptoms section, that the abbreviated version often left in the parent article will either be too technical or too imprecise! The reason for the overall length of the symptoms section is because of the need for lay explanations/interpretations of the symptoms (and because CF affects a lot of organs). If off-loaded, it would cut down on the length but I doubt that the replacement list of symptoms such as "bronchiectasis, recurrent pneumonia, pancreatic insufficiency, distal intestinal obstruction, etc" would really be preferable! Treatment is a much easier proposition to off-load, but I suspect that a few more subheadings might make a difference. I've made a few additions, let me know if they improve things at all! As for the amount of information - what are the particular areas that you think go overboard? As you might imagine, there's already significant truncation and abbreviation in every section. Thanks again for your input! InvictaHOG 16:27, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I redid the headings and sequencing of the symptoms section. I think it looks and reads a lot better now. Let me know what you think! InvictaHOG 18:59, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the thoughtful comments! I've delinked the bold text that I found. I am looking for a reference which italicizes CFTR. It certainly is a fairly widely used standard, but since everything that I'm looking at has it just as we do, I'm not sure if it is some exception? I'll dig further. As for the overlinking, I got about halfway through but it still needs more work. There's definitely some gratuitous double linking. As for the famous people bit, we unfortunately have this with every disease. In the past, we have spun off a separate article in list form. I think that with a disease like CF, it is actually nice to have successful people showcased because of the historically dim prognosis. II have created a new page for them. An alternative would be to discuss the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation within history or in a separate section, as several of the important people on that list were involved there. But, I think it works better this way. Thanks again, I'll work more on it later (have to go to work!) InvictaHOG 10:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
By all mean don't remove the notable people completely, it'd just work better if you could incorporate the listed material into the text more smoothly.--Peta 11:08, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While thearticle is impressive, I'm not for all-out gushing just yet:

There. Hope you can forgive my rather extensive pickiness.Circeus 18:25, 25 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the input! I'll work on these things over the weekend (finally finishing up a stretch on service) and hope to fix them to your liking! InvictaHOG 23:26, 25 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you again for the thorough reading - close attention such as yours is absolutely required to make a great article. I have addressed the bulk of your points and the article has definitely improved as a result. I plan to self-resize the image when I am back home on my own computer. I also prefer to keep the referencing system standardized and think it's nice to leave off a separate system such as cite web - I am not currently planning on introducing a separate system unless there is a unified call or guideline available.
A few other points I'm going to need clarification on, however. The stats for "normal" pregnancy is confusing - do you want the total number of prenancies in the US, among "of age" women, etc? The CF stat is not one which is meant to be compared - it is simply there to show that there are non-trivial numbers of women with CF who are pregnant in a random year. Comparison wouldn't seem to give that more clarity. The bile duct blockage sentence does not imply that it happens normally to me - in fact, it is always abnormal. I think that, taken in concert with the prior sentence, more detail is not necessary but let me know what you feel is unclear. As for infertility, how CF leads to infertility is well described in the section on infertility - let me know what it is that is missing. ΔF508 is a separate page and, personally, I believe that it deserves its own page. It should be merged with CFTR and not CF, in any event. I have reviewed a lot of literature about the CFTR gene and protein - I do not know why it deviates from convention, but CFTR seems to. I have not found italicized gene names and the protein name seems to be the same as the gene name in every database and paper I pull. I believe that every instance of CFTR in the article is clear as to the product being referred to. I've tried to prevent your reading of "lung function and exercise tolerance" as "lung exercise tolerance" by linking exercise tolerance (without the lung!). As for the point about CF killing patients - I would hold that people with CF die of CF (unless they die of something like a car accident!). It doesn't matter if it's because of lung disease, heart failure, liver failure, kidney failure, complications of diabetes, etc. The root cause is CF and, just like the mantra "AIDS doesn't kill people," attempts to separate out cause and effect don't make much sense...let me know what you think. Thanks again for your close attention! InvictaHOG 02:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Indeed, some of my points resolved out of themselves(the merge I remove mentions of form the article since it hasn't been discused in months and was forgotten) or might not have compeltely appropriate(true, there is no sense incomparing the 191 pregnancy number).
  • You might to have a good look at User:Ekem restructuration of the article, though. They split the "prenatal diagnostic" in several overly short sections and shortened the elad, amongst other changes that might play against you at WP:FAC.
  • I converted the two web references myself. I do think they look better that way.
  • That's it! Circeus 01:38, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]