This user is a student editor in University_of_Washington/ASTBIO_502_Astrobiology_Special_Topics_-Origin_Of_Life_(Autumn_2023) . |
Hello, Brinaluvsrocks, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 16:45, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Hi, and thanks for your efforts to improve Wikipedia, very rare among student compelled to do coursework here.
However, your changes today are to say the least drastic, increasing the article's length by over 20,000 bytes to an unwieldy 200,000 bytes. I mention length because when I brought the article to "Good Article" status, I took considerable pains to shorten the text (I got it down to a more-or-less bearable 160,000 from a dreadfully overloaded 314,000 bytes, something I hope I will never see again in any article. So I'm not exactly chuffed to see a 10% rise in one short session.
Leaving aside your editorial decisions about content for the moment, I'd like to draw your attention to the "Main article:" and "Further information:" links at the top of almost every section of the article. This is a sign of a mature and well-developed subject area: the "Abiogenesis" article is at the top of a hierarchy of many subsidiary articles. Only the most essential points should be made in the top-level article, for the good reasons that it must be kept short, and it is meant to summarize the key points of the rest of the hierarchy. "New" materials should, therefore, nearly always be added to subsidiary articles, not right up here. If theory has drastically changed, then large changes, perhaps the addition of whole articles, should take place further down; and then a brief summary of the changes should filter its way slowly upwards, a major area of research perhaps causing one or two sentences to be rewritten at the top of the tree (because, after all, the whole of the history of the subject up to that point remains historically valid).
One way that the article's length was brought under control was by putting a considerable amount of material into a list-like article called Alternative abiogenesis scenarios. This covers
1 Environments
1.1 Fluctuating salinity: dilute and dry-down
1.2 Hot freshwater lakes
1.3 Geothermal springs
1.4 Deep sea alkaline vents
1.5 Volcanic ash in the ocean
1.6 Gold's deep-hot biosphere
1.7 Radioactive beach hypothesis
1.8 The hypercycle
2 Biochemistry
2.1 Fox proteinoids
2.2 Protein amyloid
2.3 First protein that condenses substrates during thermal cycling: thermosynthesis
2.4 Pre-RNA world: The ribose issue and its bypass
2.5 Autocatalysis
2.6 Synthesis based on hydrogen cyanide
2.7 Simulated chemical pathways
3 Viral origin
4 Encapsulation without a membrane
4.1 Polyester droplets
4.2 Proteinoid microspheres
5 Jeewanu protocell
6 RNA-DNA world
I'm not a person to stand on ceremony, but it is the case that a Good Article has been through a formal review process, so not only has it involved substantial work, but it has had some kind of approval stamped upon it. This does not mean it can't be changed – everything in an encyclopedia, like everything in science, can be modified given sufficient evidence. What it does mean is that change should be carefully considered, and made in the most appropriate place. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 20:43, 8 December 2023 (UTC)