Wikipedia:Peer review/Traditional African Medicine/archive1

Traditional African Medicine

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I am new to Wikipedia, writing this article as a project for my Shaping of the Modern World class, and know that there is a lot that can be changed and made better in my article. Any and all comments are welcomed and greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Mitchel2 (talk) 02:58, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Comments by H1nkles

First off, welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your work! I will be glad to go through the article and give some feedback. I see that you are new to editing so I'll sprinkle in guidelines and protocols as we go. If my review is too rudimentary please forgive me and let me know. It'll take me a little time to go through the article due to its length and my own time constraints but I'll give it a thorough once-over. I'm also available for discussion if you wish.

Lead

• Please see WP:LEAD, this is a good explanation of what the lead should be. In short the lead should summarize the entire article, discussing every point brought up in the article. A good lead will give a reader a skeletal view of the subject. The rest of the article fills in the details. The lead should not bring up information that is not found in the article. Since I haven't read through the article I'm not sure if your lead is comprehensive. Usually an article of this length would have around two solid paragraphs for a lead. That's a general rule not a strict guideline though.
• This sentence is a run-on sentence and is it a quote?

"According to the World Health Organization (WHO) the definition of traditional medicine may be summarized as the sum total of all the knowledge and practical, whether explicable or not, used in the diagnosis, prevention and elimination of physical, mental, or social imbalance and relying exclusively on practical experience and observation handed down from generation to generation, whether verbally or in writing."

If it is a quote of WHO then there should be quotations marks. If it is a paraphrase then consider breaking the sentence into two sentences. It's just a bit wordy.

• I don't want to talk a lot about writing since you may be a better writer than I am and because you are asking for more content review, but a good rule with writing is that less is more. If you can say it 10 words rather than 15 then use 10 words. Try to convey your message using a few words as possible and make each word count.
• I don't think you need an exhaustive list of every ailment the healer can cure. Instead pick 5 or 6 that convey the wide variety of illnesses that healers address and leave the rest of the list for the body of the article. Remember it's a summary in the lead.
• It seems to me that you will likely need to rewrite the lead. I would concentrate on the definition, then discuss history and its connection to religion. In the second paragraph I would go into treatments and diagnoses and end with thoughts on traditional practitioners and their relationship with western partitioners. The info currently in the lead is good but it doesn't really fit the lead criteria set up in the Manual of Style, which is Wikipedia's (WP) guiding principles of article writing and formatting.

History

• Watch combining tenses in your paragraphs. In the colonial section I moved the present tense information to the end of the paragraph and kept the past tense information together.
• I was confused by this statement:

"Due to this, recent interest has been expressed in integrating traditional African medicine into the continent's national health care systems."

How can you have a continent with national health care systems? The wording seems a bit odd. Is there an African Continental agency that is mandating this be included in each nation's health care system? This should be clarified.

• This is a very important sentence,

"However, the highly sophisticated technology involved in modern medicine, which is beginning to integrate into Africa's health care system, could possibly destroy Africa's deep-seated cultural values in its traditional medical practice."

I, as a reader unfamiliar with this subject, want to know more about this statement. How will advanced technology harm or even destroy Africa's traditional medicine practice? Will this be discussed later? The section is left hanging with a statement that is begging for clarification. That's all I can do now, more to come later. H1nkles (talk) _{citius altius fortius} 17:37, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Diagnosis

• You have a rather long quote in this section. See WP:QUOTE for guidelines on how to use quotes. Long quotes like this are somewhat discouraged but it is a case by case issue. Just be sure you can justify the necessity of having the entire quote vs paraphrasing part or all of what was said.
• I'm not sure about the image of an antiquated X-Ray machine. The topic of the section is on the use of mysticism and divination to achieve a diagnosis rather than medical science. Even though the picture is of a very rudimentary and outdated machine it seems to me to be an example of what tradition African medical diagnosis is not.

Treatments

• I was confused by this sentence,

"For example, raw beef is soaked in the drink of an alcoholic to induce vomiting and nausea and cure alcoholism."

Do you mean that the beef is soaked in the drink of an alcoholic person? Or is it dipped in an alcoholic drink? Or is it dipped in alcohol (isopropyl for example)?

• Here is a vague statement,

"The weather and events are also said to be manipulated by diviners by the use of plants."

What events are you referring to?

• I note that you have several bold words in this section. SeeMOS:BOLD for thoughts on using bold and italics. If you feel it is justified to use bold text (or any text modifications) then please do let me discourage you, just make sure it is consistent with these guidelines.
• Great image of the tree with the stripped bark. Very topical!
• Regarding linking, see WP:LINK, you want to link terms not commonly used in English, for the most part you do a good job of linking. One of the guidelines of linking is that you only need to link the term once, perhaps twice if the article is particularly long. The Ibos people is linked twice, I delinked the second mention of them.
• You also have a small quote in the Magic section, who says this quote? You should ascribe it to someone if you're going to directly quote it.
• I would watch out for terms like "peculiar" in this sentence:

"Richard Onwuanibe gives one peculiar form of magic the name 'Extra-Sensory-Trojection.'"

Using "peculiar" can put a negative spin or bias on the sentence. WP:NPOV is a very important part of WP. I feel that your article is very balanced so I only bring this up for future reference.

Religion

• Watch for consistency in capitalizing "God". Normally it is capitalized but not always.
• I'm wondering if this information could get folded into previous sections. You discuss the role religion plays in a few previous sections. Something to think about anyway.
• Another long quote, see above.

Traditional medicinal practitioners

• I'm not sure this sentence is correct,

" In traditional African societies, the payment for a treatment contributes to how effective it will be."

The way it reads seems to indicate that the more someone pays the more effective the treatment will be. I don't think that's right but I could be wrong so I don't want to change it.

• What other forms of payments were or are being used other than monetary?
• In the "Learning the trade" sub-section you use the term "you" to refer to people desiring to become healers. Consider a different term that is more impersonal or third person.
• This sentence might be overstating things a little,

"Without these traditional practitioners, many people would go untreated and the results would undoubtedly be fatal."

You've listed several ailments treated by traditional medical partitioners that are not fatal.

• Is TMP in the table referring to "Traditional Medical Practitioners"? If so you should spell this out or clarify in a note under the table. It is confusing otherwise.
• "...Northern pharmaceutical companies..." - Do you mean "western"? Also why is Northern capitalized?

Relationship with western medicine

• "Many Western societies do not agree with the traditional practices of medicine in Africa and believe that the continent would be better served by integrating Western practices into African's health care system more wholly."

There is a concept in WP called weasel wording. The idea is that editors (yours truly included) have a tendency to state information using terms like, "many people believe...", or "experts claim...", or "many western societies do not agree...". There is no credible support for the information just a vague attribution to something. This sentence is an example of weasel wording. Consider rewording so as to avoid this mistake.

• See WP:LIST for thoughts on lists within articles. Usually lists are to be avoided when a textual alternative is available. I think the list in this section could be converted into prose and I would suggest doing that.
• Also to keep the article balanced and avoid bias I would recommend discussing areas in which western medicine has helped Africa. Perhaps even how western medicine has helped traditional medicinal practitioners. It seems as though the opposite is certainly true, I wonder if traditional medical practitioners have been aided by western medical advances?

References

• References are always difficult primarily because there are so many different ways to do them. The most important thing is to pick a format and stick with it consistently. See WP:CITE for good formats and thoughts on references. Also see WP:VERIFY for information on the credibility of sources.
• Your format looks just fine except that you should put in page numbers in you in-line citations, which show up in the "Notes" section. Referring to the book is good but specifying which page(s) the information is found on is a huge help to readers and necessary when citing books. Sorry about that, I know that will take a lot of work.
• In the References section I would recommend using a template like {{cite book}}. This will make the presentation of the information much more professional and you wont have those URLs. See the Winter Olympic Games referencing as an example of this. You can hit "edit" in the section listing all the books and see how the references are formatted.

Overall

• This is a great start, you have really done a lot of good work and made a great contribution to WP. You do have some work to do to make it consistent with the Manual of Style but that is more cosmetic than anything else. The content is solid, the references are credible, and the information is very encyclopedic (as opposed to so many articles about South Park and Wrestlemania). Please keep up the good work, if you can clean up the issues listed above I would strongly recommend you nominate the article at WP:GAC in the hopes that it could become a Good Article. If you're interested in this make sure it meets the Good Article criteria first. Well done and keep up the good work. Please feel free to contact me on my talk page if you have any questions or concerns regarding this review. H1nkles (talk) _{citius altius fortius} 20:42, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Second comments by H1nkles

I was asked by the nominating editor to review the article again now that work has been done to improve it.

• I would remove the list of specific diseases and injuries that can be cured with traditional medicine from the Lead. The Lead is to be a summary of the article so keep it more summary in nature.
• I would also add a bit about the history of traditional medicine, a summary of the various treatments used, and it's relationship (or lack thereof) with western medicine. This will help to make the Lead more complete and a better summary of the article. A two to three paragraph lead would be sufficient.
• The references look a lot better! Good job there.
• Reviewer Jezhotwells indicated that you need to trim out redundancies and tighten up the prose. I agree with this. One area of clean up would be towards the end of the article. After the table in the "Traditional medical practitioners" section you discuss the cost and availability of Western medication, you go on to relate Dr. Lambo's assertions about the medicinal possibilities that are being explored by Traditional practitioners and how these medications could even be effective against AIDS. The next section is about the problems of using Western medicine in rural Africa and then there's another paragraph about possible cooperation between Western pharmaceutical companys and traditional African medicine. I feel like this last paragraph could be combined with the one in the previous section, similar points are being made and you could condense the information to help stream line the article a bit.
• I see that you have been working to condense the Spirituality and Religion sections, that was another place where I would have said there was overlap. I think you've made good strides there.
• I've been doing a bit of copy editing, just to tighten up the prose and remove unnecessary words.
• I would recommend taking a look at what else Jezhotwells suggested, along with my previous review. If you can knock off those things then I think you should be in good shape. The article is already looking much better, more compact and organized. Keep up the good work and let me know on my talk page if you have any specific questions or concerns. H1nkles (talk) _{citius altius fortius} 17:32, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Birgitte SB's neutrality concern

• I have a major concern over the neutrality of this article. From what little I have read about the situation in South Africa, the current political push to see sangomas given recognition similar to medical doctors is extremely controversial. I was surprised to no mention of the most notable controversy in South Africa traditional medicine. Where the Health Minister announced that antiretroviral pills are toxic and encouraged all HIV positive people to stop taking them and instead treat themselves with the traditional remedies of garlic and beetroot. The article as it stands is too biased to meet Wikipedia standards.--BirgitteSB 20:06, 3 May 2010 (UTC)