Wikipedia:Peer review/Carbon dioxide/archive1

I'd like this to be a Featured Article, and I think that it's extremely close. I'd like the red links to be fixed and the shortest sections expanded. C. M. Harris 12:21, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • An article of this length needs more than 9 inline citations. There are large swaths of the usage and biology sections that are totally unreferenced.
  • The lead doesn't really summarize the article and needs to be expanded. In particular, dry ice is mentioned without reference to its use, greenhouse gases get only a brief mention, and there's nothing specific about the gas being a poisonous byproduct of human (animal) respiration, which is what I think a layperson knows most about it. Carbon fixation should be mentioned and linked, and CO2's role as a product of complete combustion should probably be mentioned somewhere.
  • The second person ("You may notice this sensation..." etc) is unencyclopedic in tone.
  • The usage and biology sections both read like random collections of facts rather than coherent prose. The uses section may be a tad more difficult to fix since the uses are so diverse, but rewriting the biology section for continuity shouldn't be difficult; there's an abundance of reference material available. In general, it looks like the atmospheric section has received vastly more effort than these two sections.
    • The entire "Solid CO2" section should be a subsection of "uses", and while dry ice bombs are a use for the substance, I wouldn't classify that use as industrial. The amorphous glass material belongs somewhere as a physical property of CO2, not a use (I don't think this has any industrial applications).
    • In addition to being listy, the biology section is awkwardly written. "...dangerous to the life and health of humans, plants and other animals"?? What?
  • The image illustrating the vibrational modes of CO2 is interesting and relevant, but misplaced. Move it, along with a text discussion of vibrational modes, to another section (possibly "properties", after the discussion of the absence of dipole - which itself should get a mention that there can be an induced dipole effect) and let that provide the necessary context for the statement about vibrational modes in the atmosphere section.
  • There's a bit of a linkfarm at the end.

Opabinia regalis 17:16, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some additional comments:

  • Suggest comparing to the Acetic acid article, which is FA. You can't go too far wrong by mimicking the layout, where applicable.
  • Typo: "conducive"
  • The line "The data can be accessed at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok_data.html" should be converted into an inline citation. Likewise anywhere else in the text where there is an embedded external link, I'd prefer to see {{cite web}} be used instead as an inline citation. That provides more information about where the reader is heading.
  • Somewhere in the article you might mention that CO2 is the primary component of the atmospheres of both Venus and Mars. It has been discovered in the interstellar medium [1] and is "an abundant component of cold interstellar grains".[2]

Thanks! — RJH (talk) 22:37, 31 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some other brief comments and ideas...

  • The article itself does not seem to be very cohesive. There are portions of the article where unrelated ideas are put together one sentence after another with little continuity - see the "uses" section as an example.
  • The use of carbon dioxide as a solvent does not seem to be described adequately - there is an example of how it is used, but not why it acts as a good solvent for certain chemicals. I would expect to see something about supercritical fluids - a brief mentioning would do. Also, something about the predominant solvent interactions would be good.
  • There should be something about the molecular point group that carbon dioxide belongs to, and its implications for IR and Raman spectroscopy. The reason is that CO2 is a rather "simple" system where this can be clearly illustrated - but perhaps this might be better put in the spectroscopy articles.