User talk:Angela432/HeLa

MH comments

Nice job on the organizational revisions! Now, it's time to get more involved with the content and citations.

1. Starting with the 'Controversy' section, go through and make sure all statements are thoroughly cited. How do you know that there was no communication between tissue donors and doctors? There are a number of articles testifying to this, and I suspect you can even find one (use the JHU library search) that discusses Lacks as precisely such an example. Skloot's book would also be a good source to cite for some of these statements, such as the fact that Lacks' family couldn't access her files. The rule of thumb for citations - in this article as well as in your own work - is that if the reader should be able to find the source of every specific fact. So if it says there were 'many examples of the lack of informed consent', I should be able to click the citation at the end of the sentence and see these examples.

2. The 'Uses in Research' section is already fairly good, but again, check all the citations and make sure everything is watertight. What is the source for stating that the HeLa cells were important in the study of Downs syndrome, for example? Use the library and Google to look into any specific research connections.

3. The 'Analysis' section has no citations, and needs them. There is nothing in the 'Telomerase' section and the 'Chromosome number' section has a huge block quote without a citation. Most of these are present in the original article - if you have a specific reason for having stripped them, find alternatives, but if this was a copying accident, make sure they're put back in.

4. The 'Contamination' article could use a substantial trim. Since you have footnotes, it's generally not necessary to explain who said what in the main text, and rather than leaving the original block quotes, paraphrase everything down into a summary. Look at the summary of Gold's book and think about how this information could be incorporated into the rest of the discussion; similarly, paraphrase the ICLAC quote and use it as information rather than presenting it as is. As an exercise, see if you can get the entire section down to three paragraphs.

Given that this is a relatively high-traffic article, it's also particularly important that you post a comment to the Talk page of the original article explaining that you're drafting a new version of this article for a WikiEducation class, providing a short summary of the changes you're planning to make (reorganization, removal of certain sections, etc.) so that when you begin moving this across in a couple of weeks, it won't come as a surprise.

Read your peer reviews and continue to revise in the sandbox (all your old drafts are saved automatically). Let me know if you have any questions as you prepare your second draft!