Wikipedia:Peer review/Quark/archive3

Quark

Previous peer review

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for October 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Since the article failed the FAC, it seemed like many editors were discouraged from continuing improving the article. However, most of the major points emerged in the FAC were addressed. But before nominating the article for GA (FA seems too premature to me), I'd like other editors to take a look at the article. In particular, there are some "strange" statements which I'd be tempted to remove as nonsense, but cautiously I marked them with inline tags. (Specifically, the one about "strange quarks in the vacuum" in section "Spin" sounds quite odd, but these theoreticians say lots of strange things these days, so if some references were added showing that this hypothesis is more than WP:FRINGE, I would be happy to keep it in the article. As for glueballs not having an associated wave, it does cite a book, but I strongly suspect that whoever added that statement misunderstood what the source meant, as the de Broglie wavelength is a trivial consequence of the way the momentum operator is defined – in other words, the wave isn't "associated" to the particle, it is the particle. So that statement can only be true if it means "glueballs cannot be described by the known quantum mechanics framework", which sounds very unlikely to me.)

Thanks, Army1987 (t — c) 09:25, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Here are a few, hopefully useful comments:

1. I would like it if the quark names were consistently italicized in order to avoid confusion in the text. For example: "validated the existence of a third strange quark" is ambiguous, whereas "validated the existence of a third, strange quark" is not.
2. The terms "spin", "color charge", "coupling of quark hadrons", "sea quarks" and "quantum field" are first introduced without explanation. Of those, three are covered later in the article. I think WP:JARGON applies here.
3. Based on past experiences with FAC, it is considered good practice to reduce the amount of parenthetical text. An example is "(These numbers refer to... charges cancel each other.)" which manages to fill up most of the paragraph. Are parentheses necessary here? Should it be converted to a footnote instead?
   • I did some copy edits to reduce the number; hope you don't mind. The example above still exists, however. I wasn't sure about how best to address it.—RJH (talk)

     Fixed, copying that paragraph from the 2005 version of the article. -- Army1987 (t — c) 13:59, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

4. [partons? (a term proposed by Richard Feynman, and supported by some experimental project reports),] Did the experimental reports support Feynman's term or the existence of partons? It is somewhat unclear, and it would also be good form to eliminate the parentheses.
5. [which fitted perfectly with the three-quark theory in that one might have "three quarts of drinks at a bar."] Huh? Are three quarts some type of standard quota for physicists?
6. [Atoms usually have as many electrons as protons; since ... is called an atomic ion.] This does not seem relevant to the subject.
7. [...as in the previous case of the interaction between the quark and antiquark of opposite charge colors.] This seems redundant and unnecessary.

   This is fixed now.

8. "The Singularity and Other Problems" is missing a publisher and ISBN number.
9. There are a few instances of "unnecessary vagueness", as described in the MoS at Wikipedia:MoS#Unnecessary vagueness. For example, "...contributes most significantly..." and "...the strength of the bind dramatically increases".
10. The citation formats are inconsistent. Some have first name last; others first name first. This issue is sure to come up during FAC.
11. Can the "Color confinement and gluons" section provide some information about the range over which the confinement occurs (along with a comparison with the typical size of an atomic nucleus). Perhaps a plot can be included? At what radius does the separation of quarks result in the formation of a quark-antiquark pair?
12. Having a particular interest in astronomy, I'd like to see some discussion of quarks during the early phases of the big bang. Especially the Quark epoch and Hadron epoch. You might also mention Quark star and possible quark novae (quirky supernovae).

    Good idea. The semi-automated peer review suggests that the lead shouldn't mention concepts which aren't expanded in the rest of the article, which the last sentence does. -- Army1987 (t — c) 18:06, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

13. Seems like it could use an infobox of some type. Perhaps there needs to be a {{Infobox Particle Family}}?

Thanks.—RJH (talk) 16:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

(I hope you don't mind the fact that I'm changing bullets to numbers in your list in order to refer to individual items more clearly.)

No problem.

As for (1), italicizing the names everywhere would look excessive to me, but sentences like that should be clarified, and probably not only with italics. As for (5), there was once a long quotation of Gell-Mann, explaining why he liked that name, but it was removed. I have re-added fragments of it to the footnote reference, but personally I wouldn't object to re-adding it to the main text, as that subsection is named "Etymology", after all. Overall, you make good points, that should be addressed. -- Army1987 (t — c) 16:31, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay.—RJH (talk)

• I think that merging the sections "Hadronization", "Color charge", "Color confinement and gluons", and "Sea quarks" into one or two sections (titled "Strong interaction", or "Strong interaction" and "Quarks in hadrons", or something like that) might be a good idea. Only, I'm not sure on how to implement it (e.g., where the resulting section(s) would go, etc.). Of course, they shouldn't have too many details, as they could go to the articles Hadron, Color charge, Color confinement, Quantum chromodynamics, and Strong interaction. OTOH, I've found that much information from the 2005 version of the article, favorably reviewed by Nature and listed as a GA is missing from the present version of the article. Some of it is very technical, but most of it could reasonably belong to the article, if adequately explained. -- Army1987 (t — c) 13:52, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I have returned from a wikibreak initiated on the 13th of the month. I would just like to state that I will be keeping an eye on this article and am now hoping to set some time aside to continue with improvements to this article. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 06:51, 29 October 2008 (UTC)