Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Quark

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[edit] Quark

Stable, complete, peer reviewed, current "good article", important topic. Nature reviewed this article, and mistakes were corrected. -- Zanimum 16:36, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

• Comment - Nice article. (a) The second paragraph of the introduction seems a little technical for the casual reader. Get technical later - but imagine the introduction will be read by a 12yr old kid who is writing an essay for school. I would mention something like electrons, protons and neutrons being made of three quarks and say how many quarks there are. Keep it simple. (b) References work better if tied to statements in the article - I'd recommend embedding the references into the text using <ref>...</ref> so they appear as numbers in square brackets and are automatically listed and linked. This allows readers to confirm a particular key fact by looking at a particular reference. SteveBaker 16:47, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

• Comment - This is indeed a "good article" but not quite at (but also not too far from) featured standard, for me. Generally, I think it needs a good copyedit and unpacking of the rather dense prose to make it more comprehensible to a non-technical audience. For example, "The approximate chiral symmetry of QCD, for example, allows one to define the ratio between various (up, down and strange) quark masses through combinations of the masses of the pseudo-scalar meson octet in the quark model through chiral perturbation theory..." - what? Does this mean something like "You can assign relative masses to quanta by <some unexplained magic>..."? Further, the prose is rather choppy, with little narrative style, and the sectioning seems excessive (many sections have only one paragraphs with only a few sentences). Finally, Finnegan's Wake is mentioned (eventually) but there is no indication of pronunciation. This can, and should, be an excellent article, but it is not there yet. I would suggest a further period of peer review, but the first one does not seem to have done much. Someone at the physics WikiProject could take it under its wing, or the new scientific peer review process could help (when it finishes deciding who should be on which committee and actually starts reviewing things). -- ALoan (Talk) 17:43, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

• oppose+comment At this point this is not FA quality. Besides obvious copyediting such as in-line citations, the article is not a good read at all.

• The lead should bring relevance, and the present form is not very enticing, but confusing. The article is about quark, but why mention "antiquark" and why go into detail about "confinement." Looks as if the article is about properties of confinement rather than quark. I think the lead needs a major rewrite: briefly about history of discover, what "gap" does it fill, what is it, and how is it observed.
• The article goes into property of quark too fast, needs to add a section about what actually is quark. In fact, the current form does not even mention that quark is a subatomic particle until the second paragraph, and was not even explicitly stated.
• The organization of article is confusing at this point. I suggest this order: a paragraph about fundamentals of atomic physics, then history of discovery, then what gap does quark fill, then properties of quark (1st mass, then color, flavor, and spin...etc), then anti-quark. I think this is more logical. Also, be sure to compare these properties to other more familiar subatomic particles such as protons or electrons.
• Nobody knows about hadrons and mesons. Rather than giving examples of each, mention about what they are concisely. This should compliment to the first section that I suggested about background of atomic physics.
• Need to add some key or milestone primary research papers as references. Textbooks and webpages don't count as "good" sources for science articles IMO.
• Summary Even though I'd like to see more of science articles become featured, and I don't usually oppose sciecne FACs (but rather just comment), I think this article still needs lots of work before getting into featured status. Anyways, I'll come back if I am needed. Temporary account 19:04, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

• Object. Incomprehensible to the general reader, despite the fact that quarks are a topic that might attract a wide audience. As SteveBaker said, you should use this page to explain the basic proton-neutron stuff and put the high-level physics on subsidiary pages. -- Mwalcoff 03:03, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
  • The trouble with this topic is that the subject's name is just well known enough to attract people who know literally nothing about Quarks beyond their names and that they are subatomic particles. If such people come here, they'll get no further than the first or second sentence before they run out of skills to read further. That's a shame because there is much that may be usefully said to help those people understand what's going on. But then you'll also have people who are perhaps just starting in on a particle physics education who might come here for more detail - and perhaps (we might hope) that there is enough deep information to attract people who know enough to write an article like this who just need to check a number or an obscure fact. This is quite unlike many other Wikipedia articles. It's unlikely that someone will come looking for an article on a really obscure topic such as (say) the Meissner effect - so the 10yr old kid level of discussion might not be quite so important. On the other hand, a subject like Automobile is one where just about every reader knows a heck of a lot about it already and is probably looking there to find links to deeper information that they don't know how to search for any other way. But Quark falls right into that gap where you need BOTH a really simple, basic introduction to the subject for kids AND super-deep techy stuff for the expert. I don't think you need to split the article up or anything that drastic though. I would suggest simply removing the tricky stuff from the introduction and replacing it with a clean, jargon-free statement of what a Quark is - how they fit into the bigger picture - and what they are all called. Then, I would add a section with half a dozen paragraphs of somewhat more detailed information - maybe aimed at an intelligent (but ill-informed) adult. Then all of the existing article could be placed after that - more or less unchanged. SteveBaker 04:16, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
• Object. The concerns from peer review have not been addressed: the article is rather difficult to a layman (although not as bad as some reviewers suggested), and the lack of inline citations is a serious problem.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 03:29, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

• Comment-While I like this article, I think it should go in one of two directions; I feel that there is not enough information in individual sections, and at the same time I feel that the general reader might find this article too complex. I think it should either be simplified or fleshed-out. --Kahlfin 20:34, 24 March 2006 (UTC)