Wikipedia:Peer review/Median nerve palsy/archive1

Median nerve palsy

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I am a student from California Polytechnic State University in Pomona. We are doing a class project for a Kinesiology class called Movement Anatomy and Kinesiology. As part of the project, our group is responsible for researching a topic and either updating a Wikipedia article or creating a new one. We decided to create the Median nerve palsy page. Any input would be helpful. Thanks, Jjjballr911 (talk) 16:05, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your contribution to Wikipedia. This is a good start, and I have several suggestions for further improvement.

• Significant parts of the text lack citations to a source or sources. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for every paragraph in the article except, usually, the lead. If one source can verify all of the claims in a paragraph, the citation should come at the very end of the paragraph. In addition, each set of statistics, every direct quotation, and every unusual claim should be supported by a reliable source. The first three paragraphs in the "Anatomy" section, for example, are without sources even though the claims they make cannot be said to be common knowledge. They do not at the moment meet the guidelines of WP:V.

• The lead of a Wikipedia article should be an inviting summary or abstract of the whole article rather than an introduction. Nothing important should appear only in the lead. On the other hand, it's a good idea to write a lead that includes at least a mention of each of the main text sections. The existing lead, for example, says nothing about "Diagnosis". I wouldn't worry much about rewriting the lead, though, until the other revisions are done. I usually re-write my leads one more time at the very end of the process; I can't do a proper summary until I know for sure what needs to be summarized. WP:LEAD has further details.

• The language of the "Anatomy" section is highly technical. Although it's not possible to make every topic clear to every reader, the Wikipedia audience includes many people unfamiliar with specialized jargon. The links help, but it's a good idea to try to explain at least some of the terms in ordinary English. Instead of just pronator teres, for example, you might write "a forearm muscle called the pronator teres".

• Since an encyclopedia audience is general, it's better to use a word like "people" than "patients" and to avoid describing the audience as "you". WP:MEDMOS is a good source of information about writing about medicine.

• It's often helpful to look at featured articles covering similar topics. WP:FA#Health and medicine lists such articles.

• Many of the citations are just bare urls. At a minimum, a citation to a web site should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and date of most recent access. I find it helpful to use the "cite" family of templates to organize the citations. You will find these at WP:CIT. If you use them, don't mix them with the "Citation" family of templates found at WP:CIT also. Look at Asperger Syndrome in edit mode, for example, to see how {{cite journal}} is used.

• WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists suggests turning lists into straight prose whenever feasible. The existing article is too list-y. For example, the lists in "Signs and symptoms" and "Causes" would be easy to render as plain prose.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 23:54, 19 December 2010 (UTC)