User talk:1415jacobsx/sandbox

Feedback

Nice expansion of the Calyx of Held article. I have some advice on how the draft could be improved.

• The main problem with your article is that you have uncited statements. For example, the entire "Research importance section has no sources. On a smaller scale, in the "Structure" section, the first and third paragraphs end with statements that lack citations. While it's reasonable to guess that these statements are supported by the previous citations, it's not obvious that they are.

• The lead section could be a bit longer. If you read the Manual of Style for lead sections you'll see that the lead section should summarize all the major elements of the article. Given the amount that you have added to this article, your lead could be a lot longer. I also fixed some formatting issues that weren't in keeping with the 'house style' for Wikipedia articles - for example, references are supposed to go after punctuation (periods and commas), not before, and the section headers should start with ==Header== (a second-level header) for the top sections, and then go on to third-level headers, etc.

• Parts of the article (especially the "General development" section) are written in a very detailed, technical style. Articles should be accessible to readers whose background in biology is pretty basic - maybe high school or introductory undergraduate readers. That doesn't mean you have to dumb everything down, but you should try to explain things, and think about what the average reader might gain from this.

• And on the above note, the article could use more wikilinks. I added a few more. Wikilinks are valuable to readers, since they allow them to learn more about the topics discussed in an article. For example, most people won't know what some term means, they can click through and find out more. A lot of the people who read this article aren't going to know much about the topic. Adding links like these help integrate your article into the rest of Wikipedia, making it more useful to readers.

• Finally, reference 4, Tsuchitani (1997) is old - almost 20 years old. Is there nothing more recent? A whole lot has changed in the last 20 years, and any source that old runs a major risk of being out of date.

I don't want my feedback to sound too critical - you've made a really substantial improvement to that article, a really nice body of work. But it would be much better, and be much more likely to stand, if you made these improvements. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:03, 27 March 2015 (UTC)