Talk:Clonaid

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Good article Clonaid was a nominee for good article, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
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Contents

[edit] older entries

There's some uncertainty over the connections between the Raelians and Clonaid. Some reports say there are "philosophical" connections, but not direct financial or organizational links.

The sentence, "They claim that aliens taught them how to perform cloning, even though the company has no record of having successfully cloned any previous animal." seems a POV comment to me which attempts to discredit their claim with no counter evidence. If aliens had taught me to clone humans, I would expect them to do just that. If my alien friends had to walk me though lab rats first I would be less impressed with their technological superiority. I personally think UFOs are the modern era manifestation of the same phenomena that in the past was understood to be sightings of demons, in other words, it is attributable to intracranial rather than extraterrestrial events. However, I do not think we should make the article too demeaning of the views of the Raelians. --Qaz

  • So Qaz, how doe we address the situation that they haven't successfully cloned anything? -- Zoe

"They claim that aliens taught them how to perform cloning, however, they have not produced any verifiable evidence (DNA tests with samples taken under supervision for example) of having achieved the feat so the scientific community remains skeptical." This is one way you could express the same idea and it states just as strongly that there is no evidence but does not seem to talk down to the sect or whatever they call themselves. The whole article seems to have been reworked though and the offending part is gone. --Qaz

The outline of the 'whole body transplant' objectives of the Raelians is now neither in this article nor the one on the Raelians. It belongs in one or the other.

Just to clarify, this is currently discussed in Raelism, under the heading "Immortality through science?". I'm not sure the phrase "whole body transplant" is used there, but I'm also not sure that is a phrase the Raelians use, as opposed to one that one of us non-Raelians finds helpful. In any case, I think it is better covered in that article than this one, because it is extremely unlikely that Clonaid's scientists are anywhere near ready to begin investigating "whole body transplants". --Ryguasu 20:26 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)


"a couple of Dutch lesbians"? Lordy, I thought somebody would have caught that.-Sv

Where is this company incorporated or registered? --zeno 06:28 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

What do you mean by "raëlly" ? :-)

Could we have a link to this article ?

[edit] Results of automated peer review

[edit] (cur) (last) 01:52, 21 November 2006 SmackBot (Talk | contribs) m (ISBN formatting/gen fixes using AWB)

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

  • Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
  • As per WP:MOS, please do not link words in headings.
  • There are a few occurrences of weasel words in this article- please observe WP:AWT. Certain phrases should specify exactly who supports, considers, believes, etc., such a view.
    • it has been
    • allege
    • might be weasel words, and should be provided with proper citations (if they already do, or are not weasel terms, please strike this comment).
  • Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
    • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
  • As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space inbetween. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]
  • Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Kmarinas86 01:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] (cur) (last) 20:51, 25 November 2006 Kmarinas86 (Talk | contribs)

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Kmarinas86 01:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] (cur) (last) 01:07, 5 January 2007 Kmarinas86 (Talk | contribs)

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Kmarinas86 06:50, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] There are

Not sure if these are bot-made edits, but the phrase "There are", "There were", etc occurs suspiciously often and damages grammar and meaning.

Compare:

"Scientists in the field, noting the high incidence of malformations and fetal deaths in animal cloning, have condemned Clonaid for premature human experimentation."

with: "There are scientists in the field, noting the high incidence of malformations and fetal deaths in animal cloning, have condemned Clonaid for premature human experimentation."

I "fixed" the grammar by adding a "who", but it's clear that the "there are" has been added (breaking the grammar), as a "weasel word" to insinuate a minority opinion rather than majority consensus.

Other places it's been added:

"There were scientists who were interviewed regarding the announcement averred skepticism regarding both the authenticity and the ethics of Clonaid's procedures. These included Lord Robert Winston[8], head of the IVF research team at London's Hammersmith Hospital, and Tanja Dominko[9] of the Oregon Regional Primate Center's monkey cloning project."

"There are scientists with experience in animal cloning who have stated that cloning has a low rate of success per implantation, and that there are cloned fetuses which are malformed or do not survive to be born. Whether this is indicative of Clonaid's success is still yet to be seen, as IVF in animals is prone to the same problems. Regardless, there are those continue to be surprised that Clonaid does not appear to be affected by these problems; either Clonaid has been extremely lucky in discovering a superior method of cloning, they claim, or the company is making false claims. Still, there are people to whom it seems odd to that Clonaid is not more forthcoming with proof of their success."

"There are Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders who openly condemn Clonaid, and there are those who view it as challenging long-held definitions of human dignity and encroaching on the power of God, whom these faiths view as "creating Man in His own image.""

Ah, heck with it, the bad grammar (not to mention complete mangling of meaning) is getting to me - I'll check the history, and if these are additions, I will remove all "there are". Particularly blatant in bending the meaning is the claim that scientists only claim that "there are cloned fetuses which die" rather than "cloned fetuses die". DewiMorgan 19:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)


Update - the "there are" grammar gets worse as I go back in time. People have been fixing the grammar around the "there are"s without actually removing them. I regret I am too lazy to bother going right back into history to see who added them, though. I'm just removing them. If you want NPoV, do it right: don't just slap a set phrase before every claim, messing up the grammar and destroying meaning. DewiMorgan 19:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Funny typo

"Some experts noted that scientists reproductive chemistry is understood better in humans than in most animals."

This might be true, but as I've never met a non-human scientist I don't see how we would know anything about animal scientists' reproductive chemistry! Tim Vickers 22:14, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

LOL. Man. Funny and a good eye at the same time.Kmarinas86 22:21, 13 September 2007 (UTC)


I'm just wondering whether the Florida judge should link back to the RHCP guitarist..

[edit] add this

lots of pages ive been too havesaid that clonaid has anounced that the first human clone was born in 2002 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.37.109.84 (talk) 01:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA review

GA review (see here for criteria)

I've failed the article for prose, MOS issues, and coverage. The article needs to be reorganized as well as the prose worked over by a copyeditor.

  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): [[Image:|15px]] c (OR):
    would prefer that the references that are linked are not to items that require registration
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    Fair representation without bias:
  5. It is stable.
    No edit wars etc.:
  6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
    a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
  7. Overall:
    Pass/Fail:

Details:

  • Lede - does not just summarize the article, but puts forth information that is only in the article in the lede. See WP:Lede
  • Several of the footnotes go to dead article links. I'm not sure if this is because the site requires registration or not.
  • The organization of the article mixes up the contents of the edits. There are paragraphs dealing with criticism of the cloning plans intermixed with paragraphs on the plans to clone which are mixed in with paragraphs on the structure and funding of the company, all of which are under a heading titled "Plans to clone a human being" The whole article could stand to be organized better and have headings that are theme based as well as chronologically organized. I'd suggest at a minimum: a section on the organization and founding of the company, a section on early plans to clone, a section on eve, a section on the testing controversy, a section on other claims of cloned humans, a section on the planned and offered products of the company, and a section on skepticism. Note that this is NOT an exhaustive list of possible sections.
  • Surely there is a Wikipedia article on controversies dealing with human cloning? Large chunks of the information on the ethical and moral issues of cloning should be on THAT article, and not here, where they are extraneous to the focus of this article, which should be the company.
  • I'm not entirely sure it's best to cover the controversy over the cloning in as much detail as this article does. It seems to give undue weight and violates WP:NPOV.
  • There are many many prose flow issues and grammar issues in the prose. Examples -
  1. Plans to clone a human being section, first paragraph, first sentence starts with "In 31 May 1997,.." Should be "On 31 May 1997...
  1. Same sentence, the flow is stilted. Might try "... Movement had plans to set up a company..." which flows much easier.
  1. Same section, last sentence is awkward.
  1. Same section, second paragraph is choppy, especially the second sentence, which starts badly "In it was the intention..", which doesn't flow well from the previous sentence, and the part "couples the chance to have genetically identical" is grammatically incorrect.
  1. Same section, third paragraph, the sentence starting "In 19 December..." the phrasing of the last phrase is awkward.
  1. Many places are missing 'a' or 'the' which makes the sentence choppy.One example is the second sentence of the sixth paragraph of the Plans section.
  1. Plans section, fifth paragraph, sentence starting "A biotechnology firm..." the last phrase is missing an "in" somewhere.
  2. Same section, last paragraph, 'successfully attained pregnancy" is incredibly awkward and just plain odd way to phrase the concept.
  1. Same section and paragraph, second sentence is just awkward (refers to South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare in Korea, which is redundant) and says "on the week of ..." which should be "in the week of"
  2. Alleged clone section, first paragraph, the second sentence should not be in present tense, but past
  • Plans to clone a human being section, first paragraph, can you name some of the bioethicists that were opposed? And what is New Scientist, a popular science magazine or a peer reviewed journal?
  • Same section, third paragraph, who is Brigitte Boisselier? I know you mentioned she was the CEO in the lede, but the lede summarizes the article, so she needs to be named as the chief executive at her first mention in the body of the article.
  • Why the first mention? The lede clearly states here being involved with the Clonaid controversy in 2002-2003, not 1997. Otherwise the need for chronological order must be violated.Kmarinas86 (6sin8karma) 20:16, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Same section and paragraph. What year was the New Scientist article from 19 December?
  • Same section, fourth paragraph. It's unclear if the couple referred to in the first paragraph is also the couple looking for the clone of their daughter. The paragraph implies it, but doesn't explicitly state that.
  • Same section, sixth paragraph is disjointed and jumps around. It's unclear why the insects flying through the windows are significant, the bit about the grad student working on cow ovaries, or the part about it being in an abandoned high school is significant.
  • Same section, last paragraph. Needs to be reworded completely, to work on flow issues and the number of repetitions of names of people and companies. Last sentence appears tacked on.

These are just some expamples. There is quite enough here to justify failing the article, which I am doing. I have not detailed every issue I saw with the article. I only got to the second section, where I looked at the issues and decided to go ahead and fail.The article would be well served with finding an outside person to copyedit the article. I suggest a thorough reorganization and going over the article to focus it on the company itself and any controversies it was involved in. Some of the data is only tangentially related to the article (like the last two sentences of the last paragraph of the Tests cancelled section, the third paragraph of that section).

If you disagree with my review, you are welcome to bring it to Wikipedia:Good article reassessment. Ealdgyth | Talk 17:11, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] March GA

The writing and prose in this article is reasonably good, and the information is backed up by sufficient inline citations to satisfy the citation requirement. However, I can not in good conscience pass this article. There's just too much missing. First, the [[WP:LEAD|lead section is far too short, and doesn't adequately summarize the article. Secondly, if this article was about the 'History of Clonaid', it might stand a better chance at passing. But because this article is about Clonaid, the company, it is missing a lot of information about the organization of the company. There's nothing about the profits, revenues, shareholders, board of directors (governance), and other information that needs to be in an article on a corporation.

The overall organization of the article is severely lacking. There's lots of first-level headers, and many of these have long titles. I would recommend combining some of these sections to make the writing flow a little bit better together. For example, a section with a title of 'responses by scientists' with a single paragraph cited by a single source, would be better off if it's talking about the response to a specific action, and should be placed into a section dealing with that issue. Some of the sections have pretty long titles as well, and section titles like "The year before the alleged clone baby claim" should be shortened to something more clear and concise, and easier to read in the table of contents. The section entitled "Embyronic cell fusion machine" is 85% quote and 15% non-quoted text, so this is another excellent candidate for combining with another section, or expanding it.

So overall, the article meets the GA criteria with respect to the overall grammar, writing, and prose, and reference citations. But it is far too short, lacking significant content, and poorly organized that it fails to meet the criteria on the completeness and organization aspects. Dr. Cash (talk) 16:10, 10 March 2008 (UTC)