Talk:Louis Isaac Woolf/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Ajpolino (talk · contribs) 19:55, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi GnocchiFan, I'll be reviewing this article against the GA criteria. It's a shorty, so hopefully I'll be able to get through the review quickly. Ajpolino (talk) 19:55, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi GnocchiFan, I'm sorry to say I'll be "fail"ing this article's review per Wikipedia:Good article criteria as it has a copyright violation. I think it also needs a decent amount of work to find more sources so it can meet criterion #3 ("Broad in its coverage"). I've left comments below that I hope you'll find helpful in guiding your edits. Whenever you're ready, you're welcome to nominate it for GA again and a different reviewer will have a look. If you have questions, comments, or concerns feel free to let me know. Best, Ajpolino (talk) 20:58, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

1. Well-written:

The first successful trial of this diet... due to its genetic nature. Is this backwards? It says the diet was trialled, was successful, and that led to the "proposal of dietary treatments". But isn't the actual order "proposal of dietary treatments" then trial, which was successful?
Phenistix is dropped without explanation and won't be clear to most readers. Perhaps you could note something like "This urine test was the basis of the first commercial PKU screening test, Phenistix, released the next year."
The huge list of inborn errors of metabolism near the end is not a very interesting read. Perhaps you could just say "a wide range of inborn errors of metabolism" and leave it at that.
Currently there's just one section title "Early career" that contained all material up to his death. For ideas on how to better split up the article, consider looking at some of the other GAs in biology (particularly from the "Biologists" section)

2. Verifiable with no original research:

All material is cited.
Some material in the article appears to be copy-pasted or closely paraphrased from the sources. Examples: He studied chemistry at University College London and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1945 is word-for-word in the cited source. In 1947, he was awarded an ICI research fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, where he worked on inherited metabolic disorders, especially those involving amino acids. almost word-for-word from the same source. Ironically the source is released under a CC BY license which means you can take the text, but doing so without attribution is plagiarism. I'd recommend having a look at Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources, particularly this section which links to instructions on how to attribute text from compatibly licensed sources.
Ditto The idea that PKU should be treated with a low-phenylalanine diet was being put forward by doctors in the 1930s which is nearly word-for-word in the cited source. I don't believe this one is released under a compatible license, so this would be a violation of the author's copyright.
I'm not sure isolating this amino acid source was difficult for scientists is phrased quite right. It makes it sound like scientists were having trouble producing pure phenylalanine. Instead, you mean scientists were struggling to reduce the levels of phenylalanine in food, right? Perhaps you could rephrase it to clarify.

3. Broad in its coverage

Perhaps you could note that he retired in 1984, taking the title professor emeritus.[1]
The article is pretty light on details, even for an academic. I'd suggest looking for obituaries to flesh out his biography a bit. This one popped up on a quick Google search and has some biographical detail that isn't in the article. Hopefully if you look you'll find others as well.

6. Illustrated

The sole image, File:Dr Louis Woolf.png is uploaded incorrectly. As I note above the source actually is under a free license (CC BY) and so we're free to upload the image to Commons with appropriate attribution. If you need help doing this, let me know.