Talk:Neurobiological effects of physical exercise/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Looie496 (talk · contribs) 17:02, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

After discussing it with Seppi333, I'm picking up the GA review for this article. It will go slower than usual, since work on the article is still in progress, but that's fine with me. Looie496 (talk) 17:02, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for taking on this review Looie!

It should only take me a couple days at most to go through the last level 2 section and expand the remaining empty sections.

In regard to references, IIRC, every medical claim in the sections that I've copyedited is cited by at least one review or academic/medical textbook; there's a handful of supplemental primary sources in there. In nearly all cases, the quote that I appended to a reference supports any/all the text that it cites, so it should be pretty simple to WP:V check the vast majority of the article statements.

W.r.t. the lead, I intend to revise the it again (mostly just expand it) once I'm finished with the body; I intend to cite it as well using the end-of-paragraph reference style that I used in the lead of amphetamine. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 02:27, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Separate clinical effects from mechanisms of effects

The first two sections "long term effects" and "short term effects" mix together clinical effects such as improve in depression and mechanisms such as changes in neurotransmitters. To make this article more useful these two should be separated into separate sections.

The section on the elderly repeated a great deal of content that has nothing to do with exercise, thus trimmed. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:54, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

The current layout illustrates how neuropsychology relates to clinical neuroscience, which is basically what my reference textbook does. Illustrating the relationships among concepts is far more insightful than just grouping content by a common characteristic (structural change, psychological change, epigenetic change, clinical outcomes, etc). It may be more organized, but it loses something.

In any event, I need to finish rewriting this before I worry about the final layout of the article. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 17:41, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Starting review

I'm starting the proper review now -- if it's too early please say so. After an initial read-through I can see that this is going to be rather challenging, mainly because of the large mass of material. I'm going to save the lead section for last, because it needs to be a summary of the material in the body of the article. I'll start with some general points and then move on to specifics.

• References Those extended quotations are so extensive as to be copyright violations in at least some cases. I personally don't think they should be used, because even disregarding the copyright issue, they cause article-rendering problems for people with slow devices or devices with limited screen space. Looie496 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes agree. By using extensive quotes we are adding no free text to Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:24, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

I also agree, as noted below and in the provided link. It's temporary and will only remain until I'm done writing, as I don't have a photographic memory of excerpts that I consider notable from journals/textbooks. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 15:05, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

• Sources of information It would be good to include an overview of the types of information that are available. Lots of data comes from correlation studies, which are relatively weak. Randomized control studies can involve either animals or humans, and can examine effects on either brain structure/function or cognition/behavior. "Gold standard" studies, i.e., double-blind studies of the effects of exercise on humans, are relatively few in number. Throughout the article there are places where it would be helpful to clarify the strength of the evidence. Looie496 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

• Advocacy I pick up a promotional tone in several places. I myself am fully convinced of the value of exercise, but we need to be careful to maintain a neutral tone in the article. Looie496 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

• Long-term effects This section, as well as the one on short-term effects, are each long enough that they should start with an introductory/overview paragraph. Looie496 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Hey Looie, thanks for the feedback. It's a bit early for criteria related to article structure because I don't think the first two level 2 sections are adequately organized - there's some short-term material that also covers long-term effects, so there's a scope overlap that needs to be addressed somehow. Neurotrophic factor signaling is also technically a short-term effect that induces long-term structural changes, so I might end up just cutting the short/long-term sections. I'm not sure what I'll use in its place yet, but there's no point in deciding on this until I've finished adding content in both sections.

W.r.t. refs, I plan to prune the excerpts quite a bit or simply censor them once I've finished rewriting the page. See User talk:Seppi333#Citation quotations for a related conversation on this.

W.r.t. indicating source quality - that's a good idea IMO. I'll go ahead and add this in the remaining sections I revise and go back to revise the content I've already rewritten once I'm done with the rest of the page. The only section that covers any animal studies is the addiction section. Excluding the refs/text on clinical outcomes, the section is almost entirely based upon animal models of NAcc signal transduction which are fully consistent with the limited evidence from human autopsy studies.

W.r.t. advocacy, I'm not sure if you feel there's an advocating tone in the first 2 sections, but if there is, let me know what the problem text is and I'll see about fixing this. I've never really had an issue with the tone of my writing in the past though - the encyclopedic writing style is fairly intuitive. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 22:07, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Almost forgot to add this: I've been going a bit slower than expected due to unexpected off-wiki issues; I'll probably finish up the article within the next two weeks. Sorry for the delay. I'll probably end up revising it a lot more after the GA review since I intend to eventually take this article to FA status. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 22:26, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, I assumed from the slow pace that you were basically done, but I should have asked. Please let me know when you are ready for the review to commence, I'll hold off until then. Looie496 (talk) 22:53, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

I won't be finished until I remove all the maintenance templates (i.e., {{expand-section}} and {{medref}}). Any section without one of those in it or its parent section should be ready for review. At the moment, every section under long-term effects (except Neurobiological effects of physical exercise#Cognitive control and memory) and short term effects (except Neurobiological effects of physical exercise#Classical monoamines) is done. The organization of these two sections will probably be revised later though. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 00:12, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Okay, please message me on my talk page when you're done. Looie496 (talk) 14:05, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Technical fail

At this point I feel compelled to fail the nom because it has become so stale -- I actually forgot that this was even going on. Feel free to renominate when the article is ready to be reviewed. Looie496 (talk) 16:40, 9 June 2015 (UTC)