Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/JHU MolBio Ogg 2012/Section 83/Group 83C

This is the Wikipedia page for 410.602 Molecular Biology, 2012, group 83C. This group will be working on the Amplicon article.

Use the talk page here to collaborate as a group, when learning to use and navigate Wikipedia, assessing articles, or for any other topic.

Use this page (not the talk page) for article assessments (optional, see Unit 5); rationale for selecting an article (Unit 6); progress reports (Units 9 and 12); and the final report (Unit 14). Please create a new section here for each of those assignments.

There are three main reasons for choosing Amplicon as our Wikipedia article.

1. As noted in the Unit 6 directions, picking a brief article reduces the work necessary to improve the article. That is, it's low hanging fruit and almost anything we choose to add will be an improvement. As "new" Wikipedians, we feel that editing this article will allow us to learn the “ins and outs” of Wikipedia while also gaining additional knowledge on the subject. Moreover, Wikipedia has noted on the Amplicon page that it is in fact a "stub", meaning that the article is "deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject". The article is so short that it is missing vital information that is available elsewhere about amplicons. We hope to add to the information currently available on Wikipedia both with our basic knowledge of molecular biology and with further research on the subject thus making the article more worthy of encyclopedic-status.

2. It has absent references. Adding references is an straightforward task that improves the value of the article a great deal. That is, adding references gives us “the biggest bang for our buck.” While adding substance is important, it is only valuable if the content has a credible source, i.e. peer-reviewed journals, textbooks, etc. We want to ensure that the information that is currently presented, as well as the information we impart through our improvements, is credible.

3. As individuals interested in biotechnology and the basic biochemical techniques that have lent themselves to this field, our group has a passing interest in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and similar technologies. Specifically, HIV research is Anthony’s main area of interest and PCR is a mainstay for tracking viral titer both in research and conventional medicine. Diane is part of a research group whose primary goal is to use novel technologies to elucidate the genetics driving pancreatic cancer, including Next-generation sequencing such as Illumina, Ion Torrent and 454 pyrosequencing, all employing the use of amplicons. Given our shared general interest in this topic, we are looking forward to conducting further research to improve the Wikipedia page for Amplicons.

Note: There was some confusion about on which page we should post this assignment so we're technically late. However, it was completed on our talk page as of yesterday. We hope you will take this under consideration when grading.

Our team has made progress on improving our article of interest, Amplicon, by citing sources to the text of the wiki page as we found it, and by providing additional and verifiable information to the wiki community on amplicons. In particular, as the article was missing references, let alone credible references, sources associated with the text were identified and added to the wiki page. The content of the wiki page was refined and restructured to better reflect our target for the page. Grammar was also improved upon slightly.

Substantial content was added to the wiki page as well. This includes a natural gene duplication example, a refined description of an application specific to PCR, a template under application for further expansion regarding use of next-generation sequencing techniques, and a paragraph on laboratory techniques that explains ways by which amplicons are quantitated.

As a group we've mostly had interaction with Klortho, but hope to have further interaction with editors, especially those who have been contributing to the Amplicon page as we work on it. Klortho’s suggestions were helpful, but we believe some of them may be somewhat ambitious given time constraints. We continue to evaluate our options.

Our “to do list” for improvements includes further polishing of the article, fact checking, and improving the flow within sections. We may also “drill down” on some of the new content. For example, we may choose to briefly define gene capture and provide links to the provided example assays somewhere on the web. Additionally, we hope to add more information to the Applications header of the page, including other ways amplicons are employed that highlight their nature, and share with the reader some implications of amplicon production and use. We may also ultimately choose to coalesce the Examples section with the introductory section of the article. Finally, the Wikipedia Referencing Guidelines admonishes us to prefer secondary sources over primary ones when citing. This has proven challenging given our topic but we intend to at least try to find some secondary sources.

So far none of us have been able to get Wikipedia to email us when our watch pages change. We understand that was a problem described in the Student Lounge forum on blackboard. Was there ever a resolution?

Group 83B made a number of suggestions for improvement of our article. Some we viewed as too ambitious, some we implemented immediately, and some we are still in the process of evaluating and implementing.

Improvements we’ve made to the article since our last progress report include: implementing some of the suggestions made by group 83B (namely expanding the introductory section and eliminating the examples section), grammar and references cleanup, expounding on natural gene duplication, adding an example of an amplicon used in a popular ligase chain reaction assay, and adding some information on popular technologies that are used with amplicons. We also incorporated a section on Amplicon structure.

As a result of further editing and viewing other related Wikipedia articles, we recognized the importance of a strong and clear description in the introductory paragraph. As it is meant to be a basic, overarching explanation of the subject matter, we realized the introductory paragraph really sets the tone and level of clarity for the entire article. After asking co-workers and family members to reread the article and give us their feedback, we implemented changes to "clean" up the Amplicon description and make it more lay-person-friendly. We hope we have succeeded so far in this area, and will continue to make minor changes to polish it thoroughly.

We also feel that this, and restructuring sections, has improved the flow of the entire article.

We are tinkering with the idea of adding an additional paragraph in the Applications section on natural gene duplication so that all of the "methods" listed in the introductory paragraph have corresponding application points. Going forward we intend to add new subsections drilling down on the major categories of amplicons (also per group 83B’s suggestion). We hope to accomplish this in the next couple weeks to round out the Technology and Applications sections.

In general, we hope to freeze content changes by the end of November and focus primarily on polishing after that.

In terms of conversations with reviewers, while we have had direct contact with our reviewer-group 83B, we haven't had many "hits" on our page by other external editors. We look forward to receiving more comments as we head into the final stages of editing for this semester.

Most of our suggestions to group 83F, who we were assigned to review, pertained to grammatical errors and inconsistencies. They were grateful for the advice. As a group we agree that once those grammatical changes are implemented, their article will be much simpler to edit in terms of actual content. The grammatical/syntax errors truly obscured the real meaning of the information that was already present on the page and that was added to the page by the group. We look forward to editing on a regular basis in the coming weeks.

Our group made several contributions of significance to this Amplicon article. At the beginning of this course, we found this article as a "stub", too fragmented to provide full coverage on the subject of amplicons. We feel that we have given the article a considerable "face-lift", both in aesthetic structure as well as in content, to bring it closer to meeting the standard of Wikipedia's good-article-criteria. Some of the changes we made included, but were not limited to:

1. Adding references to already existing sections of the article, where references were previously absent, and fact checking all of the already posted information. Because unsourced material can be subject to removal by Wikipedia, this serviced the article significantly.

2. Improving the value of the article by adding substantial content to provide a more well rounded, layperson friendly, and credible account of amplicons. We also verified that all information that we added was technologically up to date; in fact, we created new sections to provide further examples of applications and technologies that deal with amplicons. With increasing amounts of research and interest in sequencing technologies and the application of these in large and growing fields we thought it important to create the subsections to work dually to inform and give the article the structure it was previously missing. In gauging quantity, the applications and technologies sections were most likely our largest contributions.

3. Not only did we add information, but we also sought to incorporate details while thoroughly improving the flow of the article. We improved syntax, grammar, and provided new links and a “See Also” section so that the reader can fully grasp and explore the technical information while visiting this page. In addition, we worked hard to strengthen our introductory section and picture to set the tone for the article as a whole.

4. We integrated many of the suggestions provided by our reviewer group, 83B, to refine our assigned article even further. Oftentimes, the group provided us with guidelines to follow, and we incorporated the suggestions accordingly. They were particularly helpful in offering constructive criticism for our introductory paragraphs and picture, which we appreciate.