Wikipedia:Peer review/Cancer/archive1

Cancer

This is a subject that every Wikipedia reader has been in touch with in some way or another. It is a frightening condition, and there is a lot of disinformation about it. This article has been edited into shape over the last few months and has now reached a stage where all the major points have been covered. There is a lot to say about cancers, but most of this should be on individual subpages, because cancer is not actually one disease but a group of diseases with pathogenetic similarities. I've got some specific points for this peer review request:

• Do we need more sources than the present ones? If so, what source could possibly cover this apart from whole textbooks? What textbooks would be suitable to quote?
• Are there any points that should be addressed in more (or less) detail?
• What will be needed to make this a featured article? JFW | T@lk 21:24, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

My comments:

1. I think there are too many subsections, try merging some of these subsections into the larger main sections if possible.
2. Turn any lists into prose.
3. More inline citations needed.
4. Cancer research section poorly summarizes the separate cancer research article.

— Wackymacs 21:43, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

There's little one can do about the subsections, which are needed IMHO. Same goes for the lists - I can think of only one that would benefit from prosaification. What do you mean by "inline citations"? JFW | T@lk 03:57, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Inline citations = footnotes. See Wikipedia:Footnotes. If you want to get this article featured, people will highlight on the FAC that there are lists and too many sections. (which is why I mentioned them)— Wackymacs 09:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

• The number of citations will definitely be an issue on FAC. The references section should, among other things, help point readers to authoritative references. What are the "standard textbooks" about cancer? What would you expect to see used in a medical school class? What books would you expect every oncologist to be familiar with?

Specific footnotes will probably be requested for most/all of the research-supported facts in the article; for example, the "Coping with cancer" section mentions that "studies show that having someone to talk to reduces stress...". In a case like this, where you're summarizing multiple studies, the most useful reference would be to a secondary source (a textbook that makes the same statement with a lot of individual references, or a summary paper), rather than to a single study showing this result.

To repeat one of my earlier Talk page comments, I still don't feel that this article does a good job of clarifying why cancer is fatal. This is one of the biggest aspects of the disease.

One of my most common FAC complaints is that an article does not provide enough background material or context. I think that this article would be somewhat difficult for a non-medically-educated reader to read from beginning to end without detouring to another article. It often uses medical jargon in contexts that don't illuminate the terms, relying on wikilinks to provide meaning. However, this article is very comprehensive and informative, and is a very good reference. And frankly, I expect that many of the people who find this article most useful will, unfortunately, already know much of the basic information. So I wouldn't object to the article on these grounds. -- Creidieki 20:45, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Textbook to quote A standard reference is Holland Frei CANCER MEDICINE 6. Most of it is also available online through the NLM books program, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowTOC&rid=cmed6.TOC

More comments to come. Jpbrody 19:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

This is a very comprehensive article. Disclaimer: I contributed to it substantially about a year ago. Kudos to those have kept the crackpot cancer stuff out of here. Rereading it now, I see one gap. This covers human cancers comprehensively. There is one comment about cancers in birds and how it is very different. It raises the question: what about cancers in other animals/organisms? Jpbrody 20:29, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

There should be a seperate article about cancer in animals. While there are numerous animal models, little is known about the ideal diagnostic and therapeutic management in animals. Do you give chemo to birds? JFW | T@lk 10:03, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

• Ok, good detailed article. It just needs some fine-tuning and it will be ready for FAC. Here are some comments...
  • "Adult cancers" may benefit with two parallel tables with the type of cancer and incidence/proportion in pop (one table for men, one for women). Try experimenting to see what it might look like. This could possibly eliminate the subsections "Adult cancers" and "Childhood cancers". This section on "Types of cancer" may benefit from an explanation of what the difference is between brain, prostate, etc, cancers (are they the same but just named after where the tumor was found?)
  • Wikilink "p53" in "Causes and pathophysiology" sooner.
  • The sub-section "Origins of cancer" probably isn't required and can just serve as the introduction to the "Causes and pathophysiology" super-section. Same with the first paragraph of "Molecular biology" sub-seciton.
  • Probably shouldn't mention "Quackwatch" directly in the article. Just say there are different viewpoints about alternative treatments and keep Quackwatch in the footnotes.
  • Please reference:
    • "such testing has been followed by a dramatic reduction of cervical cancer..."
    • "...self-examination is recommended ..."
    • "...recently been criticisms that breast screening programs in some countries ..."
    • "While some people are reluctant to seek counseling, studies show that "
    • "Once referred to as "the C-word,""
  • For the statement "...cancer is presently responsible for about 25% of all deaths..." the references says 22.8% (second to heart disease) and was the "0.5% of the population " calculated from there, too?
  • "In some Western countries, such as the USA[1] and the UK[4], cancer is overtaking cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death." This seems a little misleading. Please explain this a little further...for example, cancer is the #2 cause of death...rates are growing while heart disease rates are shrinking...because of better medicines, healthier foods, etc...
  • I heard almonds cure cancer.

Finally, a general comment: while it is not a FA requirement, this article could benefit greatly from the overuse of footnotes. There are certainly many sources to draw from. I think it would be great to see a footnote in each section to a study or resource that details the subject in more depth. This could be especially useful in such sections as "Chemotherapy", "Immunotherapy", "Cancer vaccines", "Types of cancer", etc. It might be able to beat Hugo Chavez#Notes's 80 footnotes. Also, for the section "Environment and diet", and especially "Cancer research", there really should be many more references to studies related to Environment and diet, and the development of Cancer research (or historic/groundbreaking studies). --maclean25 19:50, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

• Very good, but it appears that this is suffering from systemic bias. The section on Adult cancers only deals with U.S. statistics. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:07, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Further, the classification section is good, but it is very technical. Can we summarise what each of those terms mean? It's quite confusing to me... I think we need to keep an audience that doesn't have a medical background in mind here, sort of like what was done with Pneumonia. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:10, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

wikification

There was a complaint about wikification. That has been fixed. Earlier, an anon contributor, nevertheless knowledgeable about oncology but less so for Wikipedia overwrote wikified text with non-wikified text. The issue has now been resolved. -- Natalinasmpf 17:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

A couple of textbooks with reasonably detailed molecular biology sections on cancer are "Molecular Cell Biology - Lodish, Berk, Matsudaira, Kaiser, Krieger, Scott, Zipursky, Darnell" and "Genes VIII - Lewin" --Sinkingpie 16:50, 1 February 2006 (UTC)