11mgs

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April 2018

Hello, I'm NotARabbit. An edit that you recently made to Maria Grazia Spillantini seemed to be a test and has been removed. If you want more practice editing, please use the sandbox. If you think a mistake was made, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Please ask for help at the Teahouse; it’s a place designed to help newcomers. Also, you should not be editing articles about yourself—use the talk page to ask other editors to make the edits you need. NotARabbit (talk) 06:42, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Alpha-synuclein article

Hello 11mgs

I apologise that my comments at the Teahouse yesterday may have put you off editing the Alpha-synuclein article. As Fuhghettaboutit said, Wikipedia really needs subject-matter experts to contribute and, in my retirement, that's what I'm trying to do. I appreciate that you may have less time and more pressing priorities. Anyway, here are the references you wanted to add to the article, correctly formatted.

I would add them myself but I confess that I find the article a bit of a mess and I'm not confident enough I would get it correct. The main problem, as I see it, is that a lot of stuff has been added to what Wikipedia calls the lead (see MOS:LEAD) but then that material is missing from the body of the article (everything after the Contents box). According to our manual of style, "The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents." and "a lead section should .... be carefully sourced as appropriate."

The implication is that nothing should go in the lead that isn't present in the main body of the article but, in this case, I see for example nothing about NACP except in the lead and some references. Also, the lead paragraphs have way too many references, some of which are only used there and not subsequently, which is odd if this is just a summary. My conclusion is that the whole article needs a thorough clean — perhaps that's something you could get one of your students or co-authors to do? Mike Turnbull (talk) 13:26, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

References

Thanks Mike, I was just trying to make things historically correct, and try to learn to edit, the article probably has been written by somebody who does not seem to know the history of where alpha-synuclein comes from........ Thanks a lot for making the references in the proper format, I noticed that the first author in the third one should be Spillantini, Maria Grazia not Grazia Spillantini, Maria. A while ago I tried to add the first ref at the end of the sentence: "It was later determined that NACP was the human homologue of Torpedo synuclein. Therefore, NACP is now referred to as human alpha-synuclein." this work is in ref: Jakes R., Spillantini M.G., Goedert M.: Identification of two distinct synucleins from human brain. FEBS Letters 345, 27-32, 1994. PMID: 8194594. and to add after ref 73 two other references showing for the first time alpha-synuclein in filaments in PD, DLB and MSA (Spillantini M.G., Crowther R.A., Jakes R., Hasegawa M., Goedert M.: α-Synuclein in filamentous inclusions of Lewy bodies from Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. PNAS USA 95, 6469-6473, 1998. PMID:9600990); Spillantini M.G., Crowther R.A., Jakes R., Cairns N.J., Lantos P.L., Goedert M.: Filamentousα-synuclein inclusions link multiple system atrophy with Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Neurosci Letters 251, 205-208, 1998. PMID:9726379, I managed to add the reference in the list but it could not be added to the text. I did not know it was a COI to add something openly available in the literature if one looks for it... However, all this is too complicated, so I just hope somebody one day will make things straight, I am not going to try again and I do not know anybody who can do it. In any case thanks for your help and nice to have met you.11mgs (talk) 14:29, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your prompt reply. The error in the name in ref 3 is an artefact of the citation bot I use to convert the DOI for a journal article into a Wikipedia reference. After your comment, I'll transfer some of this discussion to the Talk page of the article (without COI as I don't have one!) and repeat some of our comments as above. With luck, someone competent will update the article. Happy Easter! Mike Turnbull (talk) 17:09, 3 April 2021 (UTC)