Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology/Worklist

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Contents 1 Weighted completion index 2 Blood? 3 History section 4 Grading question 5 top importance stubs 6 updating the table? 7 the Right Way to Get Involved

[edit] Weighted completion index

I added something called the "Weighted Completion Index" to the bottom of each table, which is a value representative of the total progress of the articles in that table. The calcular is simple, and is analogous to the calculation of a GPA: each article is assigned a point value according to its importance and class, and the product of these two values is the "individual completion index" of that particular article. The individual completion indices are summed, and divided by the sum of the importance values of each article, giving an initial value between 0 and the value for an FA. The percentage shown is simply this value divided by the FA value times 100. See? Simple. ;) – ClockworkSoul 00:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blood?

Why is blood on our worklist? I was under the impression that blood was counted as an organ, which is rather out of our area. What about replacing blood with some of the blood cell type pages, such as Red blood cell or White blood cell? I've tagged these pages with our project template, but don't know what level of importance we should give them. TimVickers 16:21, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Good point. I've removed the {{Wikiproject MCB}} tag and added gradings to the tags that you placed on red blood cell and white blood cell, the latter of which can in particular afford a some editorial love. – ClockworkSoul 17:52, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History section

I was bold, created a history section and moved a few articles into it. TimVickers 05:36, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Grading question

Hi all,

I've tagged quite a few articles with the MCB template and was looking at them in terms of importance grading. I'm a bit confused by the examples. It says "top" should be subjects that are part of high school education. I went to high school in Germany, so my experience might differ from the average Amerian. I assume anything that's being asked about on the SAT biology test would fall into this category? However, it lists RNA polymerase and endoplasmic reticulum as examples for "high" (lower division college level/only briefly mentioned during high school), but I do find those as part of the SAT (and I did first hear about them in high school). There are many other examples of subjects currently rated "high" or even "mid" (e.g. electron transport chain, endo- and exocytosis) that I feel should be "top" based on being high school/SAT content. Should I just boldly change the rating on those? Looking over the long list of unassessed articles, there will be a flood of "low" and "mid" importance articles in those lower categories, so I think shifting some subjects into higher categories wouldn't hurt. Also, some topics are connected. E.g. mitosis and all its phases are high school/SAT level, but only mitosis is in the top category and the phases are at a lower rating (though currently inconsistent - prophase is even rated as "low" importance). I assume this would also be the case for e.g. biochemical pathways such as the citric acid cycle, where the pathway itself should be "top" but not the individual components? Any thoughts or suggestions? - tameeria 15:36, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Addendum: On the lower end of the spectrum, what are the guidelines for a "mid" importance rating rather than "low"? I assume if it's in a textbook (graduate level), it would be mid, but what about subjects that are not (yet) covered by textbooks? Is there a minimum number of Pubmed citations, for example, that a "mid" rated article should have? Or is it just considered too obscure for any rating above "low" if it's not in molecular and cellular biology textbooks or only mentioned briefly? - tameeria 17:41, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I haven't put much thought into the importance ratings; compared to quality assessment, they're not all that important ;) I think 'top' is/should be for the topics that any idiot off the street is likely to at least recognize - the things that are universally covered in high school biology, and the things that are really critical to even a superficial understanding of the field. If you're a biologist, you might recall encountering subjects in high school that most of your non-biologist classmates have long since forgotten about. I know I learned about polymerases and the ER in high school, but I'm not sure I'd call either 'top' importance (are they as important as protein or DNA, for example?). But related topics absolutely should be consistent; I don't know why prophase would be 'low'. (On an unrelated note, they should also be consistently categorized, which is fast becoming my new pet peeve.)

I suspect that current practice is that the mid/low distinction mostly means 'this is an obscure topic that I find interesting' vs 'this is an obscure topic that I don't know much about'. I'd expect the bulk of the unassessed articles to be 'mid' or 'low', so I don't think overpopulating those categories is a problem. Opabinia regalis 18:11, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I've added some ratings (mostly in the "top" and "high" categories so far) and shifted some things around in hopes of making the ratings more consistent within categories. If any of my ratings don't make sense, please feel free to correct them. I've tried to add quality assessments, but I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. Where the article had an assessment from another project (e.g. chemistry), I've usually just copied that, which might not work for some pages as they lack biological context so far. I've also marked a couple of pages as needing attention, e.g. allele, central dogma of molecular biology, genetically modified organism, recombination, transcription factor and others. - tameeria 05:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Great! When I did do some assessment stuff (September?) I found that many of the chemistry assessments were rather outdated, so that might be something to watch for. The collaboration used to be quite active and has slipped a bit lately, but you could nominate some of the really bad ones to trigger more work on them. Opabinia regalis 17:05, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] top importance stubs

There are a few articles in the top category now that are stubs. These include: biochemical cascade, biological membrane, carbon fixation, cell theory, cell type, cohesion (chemistry), compartmentalization (biology), cytotoxicity, endomembrane system, gamete, genotype, germ cell, germline, hydrophile, hydrophobe, hypertonic, hypotonic, isotonic, phototroph, plasmolysis, recombination, semipermeable membrane, somatic cell, substrate (biochemistry), zygote. Some of these may be candidates for merging, e.g. germ cell and germ line could be merged, and transgenic organism could be merged into genetically modified organism. - tameeria 06:25, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm editing the above list as I deal with the points. TimVickers 00:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] updating the table?

One more question: How is the worklist table updated? Is it automatic, or does it need to be done by hand? I haven't touched it yet as I don't know the proper procedure. (Plus, there are now close to 4000 articles tagged with MCB templates, so I'm not sure if it's even pratical to include them all.) - tameeria 06:29, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

The worklist used to be updated by ClockworkSoul using a script that got its data from this version, which is automatically updated once a day. Clockwork's been kind of busy in real life lately and might not have been updating regularly. I'm not sure if anyone else has a copy of his script, and I'm not sure how he did the topic classifications, but the enormous growth in the bot-updated list suggests to me that it might be best to either keep this page for the most important articles, or split it into topic subpages. TimVickers has done some of the administrative stuff in Clockwork's absence; he might have a better idea of how the updating worked. Opabinia regalis 17:05, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Um, no. I'm clueless as well. Maybe Willow will know? TimVickers 17:33, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Hm, I'm following you around ;) I think I might have been imagining things, but I could've sworn someone else had that script. I left a note for Willow too. Opabinia regalis 17:57, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I think concentrating on the most important articles might be a good idea. With the immense amount of pages out there about a single gene or protein or secondary metabolite, the list might quickly become unmanagable, especially in the "low importance" section. - tameeria 18:06, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Wow... I've get distracted for a little while, and look what happens (in a good way). I'll start updating the table again, and as soon as I get the chance I'll figure a way to reorganize it so it's not so... well... vast. I just did a merge of the now ten subpages, and it's so huge that it won't even preview. Wow. Just... wow. – ClockworkSoul 16:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to filtering from the list everything with a "low" priority, at least for now as a temporary measure until I can create something more managable. – ClockworkSoul 16:30, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] the Right Way to Get Involved

I have been wanting to get involved, and because I have a background in the subject, I was interested in doing major work to the Oncogene page. I noted that it was part of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Project, so I thought it might make sense to sound out this group on the most constructive way to begin. (I have been reading the general Wikipedia Guidelines.) 128.249.96.251 17:51, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

We are a very non-hierarchical and loose organisation, so the right way to get involved is simply to start editing. I'd advise you to write for the non-expert audience and aim for a similar structure and format as some of our featured articles such as enzyme, immune system and proteasome. Adding references is easy with this tool. Just submit the PubMed ID and copy and paste the resulting output (xxxx) into the page between <ref> xxxxx </ref> I hope you enjoy editing. TimVickers 18:11, 16 March 2007 (UTC)