Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Introduction to genetics

Introduction to genetics

The lead on the Genetics article constitutes an introduction for the layman to this subject. I don't see the point of this article. Perhaps redirect. Nk.sheridan Talk 01:11, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nk.sheridan, I'd like to know why you think a layman could understand the introduction to Genetics. As I explained below, I don't think he could. Nbauman (talk) 17:50, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My rough count below is Delete 8, Keep 8, Merge 3. So we don't have a consensus to delete.

But consensus isn't just a vote. We have to address issues. I think there is one outstanding problem for keeping that nobody has answered: Genetics is too difficult for a layman or ordinary non-specialist reader. Can somebody address that problem?

If we did delete Introduction to Genetics, then we would have to substandially edit Genetics to meet the Wikipedia requirement of being understandable to the non-specialist. That would start with a rewrite of the lead -- maybe replacing it with the lead from Introduction to Genetics. Do you agree to a substantial rewrite of Genetics? Nbauman (talk)

Comment No, I don't agree with a substantial rewrite of Genetics. Perhaps I've made a mistake nominating Introduction to genetics for AfD. I saw the article as unneeded at time of nomination although I'm currently not sure this was a valid reason for my nomination. Regardless, it appears that the prevailing opinion and best arguments are for keeping the article. I appreciate the expansion work which perhaps I should have done myself! Nk.sheridan Talk 23:19, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Reads like an OR essay, possibly a school project. Is an unneeded content fork for Genetics. Nsk92 (talk) 01:58, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete As I understand it, Wikipedia is not in the business of including articles that are overviews of subjects in order to make the actual articles on the subject more accessible to the reader. In any case, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a textbook, and the article itself is supposed to be a general overview of the subject, with some degree of detail. As I see it, if we consider all articles to be parts of the same encyclopedia, then they should all be suitable for the same general audience (a very broad general audience), so making articles directed specifically toward people who are unfamiliar with the subject seems unnecessary. And I don't think a redirect would be necessary, because I doubt people are going to look for an article called "Introduction to genetics" before they look for the genetics article. Calgary (talk) 02:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete No need for this article. We already have Genetics. Electricbassguy (talk) 02:52, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Seems like an essay. Probably for a school project. Soxred93 (u t) 03:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into Genetics. RC-0722 ^247.5/1 04:41, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Merge anything useful into Genetics. If that article is not simple enough for someone unfamiliar with the subject to understand, that is a problem with the article, but not one that should be fixed by creating a separate "Introduction to..." sort of article. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 05:11, 11 May 2008 (UTC).[reply]
Delete There is no reason to merge this entry to the parent article. Someone who is unfamiliar with the subject can understand basic concepts from Genetics's lead section and can get futher information from rest of the contents. I don't think people will search a topic named "Introduction to genetics" instead of "Genetics" for their needed information.--NAHID 07:00, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Merge into Genetics, would provide some good info DarkZorro 12:39, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There might be subtle POV issues here but they aren't jumping out at me, and I don't see anything to suggest that this needs to be deleted. Merge to Genetics in the very worst case, though for a broad topic such as genetics I'm pretty sure an "introduction to..." it could be salvaged and expanded to the same degree as:

So I'm beginning to think Keep and expand would be a better result. — CharlotteWebb 12:44, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

delete it may be possible to write a useful introduction to genetics article but this isn't it. Splitting effort away from the genetics article is not desirable and the article just isn't good enough to justify doing so.Genisock2 (talk) 12:58, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, expand. Introduction to articles are excellent resources for readers ill-acquainted with the topic at hand, and provide a welcome break from the main article, which are usually quite information-dense, and expect intimate knowledge of the topic at hand, or a general knowledge of science at the least. Extremely useful in Wikipedia's mission of educating the public. Those who vote delete due to quality of the article are invited to expand it instead. — Werdna talk 12:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, deleting articles that are A) useful and B) the result of someone's very hard work is A) discourteous and B) destructive. The goal of Wikipedia should be to be useful as a source of knowledge, not a bloody clone of Britannica, just worse. Let me sum this up: there are no real reasons not to keep this and similar articles, and they are useful for a large audience. This is why it's harmful to call Wikipedia an encylopaedia. (and no, do not dare whack me with WP:ATA) --Aqwis (talk – contributions) 13:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or Merge at best - just because this is the result of "someone's very hard work" is no reason to keep an article. And, yes, according to WP:ATA, "it's useful" should not be used as an argument to keep an article. Finally, stating that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia is one of the strangest arguments I have heard. This article is a POV essay; anything useful should be placed into the Genetics article and the rest deleted. Madman (talk) 14:32, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- WP:ATA is also a POV essay . Also, both content license requirements and common sense preclude "merge and delete" from being a valid outcome. If "anything useful should be placed into the Genetics article", the revisions which originally yielded should not deleted, only mildly obscured by a redirect. — CharlotteWebb 14:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- You're playing with terms you don't know the meaning of. This is not a "POV essay" in any way. --Aqwis (talk – contributions) 15:10, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Not to argue that other things exist, but the fact that of other introductions to scienttific topics, two are FA and one is GA shows that the consensus is that this article is the sort of thing that Wikipedia includes. If it's a broken introduction, then fix it. —Quasirandom (talk) 16:49, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep since there are other articles intended to provide an easier introduction to a scientific topic. If there are issues with the article, fix them.--Berig (talk) 17:13, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I can't see a problem with keeping this article. I actually think it is much easier to understand by laypeople than the main Genetics article. It is a complicated subject and I think WP can benefit from a simpler description such as this. Pigman☿ 17:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strong keep. Wikipedia is written for the non-specialist, general reader. The main article, Genetics, is much too difficult for that audience. Even the introduction is too difficult.

If we delete Introduction to genetics, we will have to edit Genetics to make it simpler for the general audience, under Wikipedia rules.

It may be possible to rewrite Genetics for the general reader, but it would be difficult (probably contentious), and we'd have to take a lot out to keep it to reasonable length. It would be a lot easier to edit and improve Introduction to genetics if necessary.

For my work, as I said before, I write for doctors and scientists, and also for laymen such as cancer patients, social workers, environmental activists, and just interested people. Before I write, I try to talk to people in my target audience to get a sense of what they already understand and what they want to know. I was surprised to find out that even well-educated people don't understand simple concepts like "apoptosis" or "randomized controlled trial." I know by now that they don't understand a lot of the terms used in Genetics.

Some people write about biology and medicine in language that their readers absolutely must understand -- for example, textbooks, medical instructions and patient consent forms. They've done considerable research. When people write for the intelligent general public, they usually write on what in the U.S. is called 12th grade level, or senior high school. It's not Advanced Placement or A level, and it's not college freshman biology level. Here's a good example Merck Manual, Genetics of writing for the intelligent general public.

I have to make judgments about readability every day. I would say that Genetics is on at least the 14th grade level -- that is, more difficult than a good college freshman-level biology textbook (like Neil Campbell's Biology). It's more difficult than a news story in Science or a feature in New Scientist. I use Harrison's Internal Medicine as a reference, and I would say that Genetics is at least as difficult as Harrison's -- except that Harrison's is better edited. It's not Madeline's fault -- Harrison's is written by the leading researchers (often Nobel laureates), and edited by some of the best (and best-paid) medical editors in the business. It's difficult for a good scientist to write for people who aren't her peers. But Genetics is not understandable by the general reader, as Wikipedia rules require.

(If you don't believe me, run the Fleisch index -- or ask an art major to read it.)

Look at the lead: "Genetics, a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. [It cites 2 sources I can't identify or check.] Knowledge of the inheritance of characteristics has been implicitly used since prehistoric times for improving crop plants and animals through selective breeding."

What does "variation" mean in this context? A lot of people wouldn't know. Nk.sheridan says, that's no problem, they can click on the Wikilink of any terms they don't understand. But if you click on variation, you wind up in an entry that is even more difficult for a 12th grade level reader to understand. I understand that you write "variation" to remind me that genetics is related to evolution, just as the New England Journal of Medicine does. For me, and any biology student, you're taking separate ideas that I already know and putting them together in a meaningful context, like bricks in a wall. It helps me to tie together the important ideas behind it all. That's what biology teachers do. That's good. But the general reader doesn't know those ideas already. You're introducing too many difficult terms and ideas in the introduction -- for a general reader. The general reader doesn't have the bricks yet. That's bad.

A high school science teacher couldn't tell his average-level students to look up Genetics on Wikipedia.

Now look at the lead in Introduction to genetics: "Genetics is the study of how living things receive common traits from previous generations. These traits are described by the genetic information carried by a molecule called DNA." That's a good, simple, direct sentence (in contrast to the compound sentence in Genetics). It doesn't have any unfamiliar words on the 12th grade level. The entire article is a simple explanation (appropriate for Wikipedia) of some important ideas that, in the Genetics article, the general reader couldn't easily understand. Best of all, it has a glossary. Biology students have a lot of problems with all those terms. What's an allele? Even the NEJM will sometimes define "allele." (Don't click on the Wikilink for an easy-to-understand explanation.)

Introduction to genetics looks as if it were written by a high school science teacher who understood how to explain genetics to ordinary people. Genetics looks as if it were written by a scientist who understood genetics very well, including some critical ideas, but threw out important ideas so fast and in such shorthand that a non-scientist can't follow them. That's not Madeline's fault; she's a scientist, not a high school teacher. High school teaching isn't as easy as it looks.

Let's compromise. Keep Genetics, tweak it a little to make it easier to understand, and keep it on a sophisticated, biology-major level (even though that strictly speaking violates Wikipedia rules). Keep Introduction to genetics so that ordinary people who come to Wikipedia for an introduction to genetics will have something they understand. Nbauman (talk) 17:32, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree one hundred per cent. --Aqwis (talk – contributions) 18:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Did you even read the article? What is an allele? The Genetics article defines an allele when it gets to this term: In his experiments studying the trait for flower color, Mendel observed that the flowers of each pea plant were either purple or white—and never an intermediate between the two colors. These different, discrete versions of the same gene are called alleles. Maybe the information is dense when you shove it into an automatic evaluation, but the article is making a large effort to define each term as it comes to it. It does not have a glossary, because I was avoiding Wikipedia:NOTTEXTBOOK. You'll see that other terms are similarly defined as you get to them.

Your criticism that references are inaccessible is also unfair; most of the references in this article actually link back to textbook sections that you can click on, including many references into the Griffiths book. I've added a link for the first Griffiths citation, since you think it should have one; it didn't before because I was citing the entire textbook as a general reference for the article, per Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines.

I'm not making a vote yet on whether the intro to genetics should be kept, but I resent your cursory dismissal of the main article (one that looks like you may not have actually read it). Madeleine ✉ ✍ 17:53, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and expand. We have a bunch of "Introduction to ..." articles, and belonging to that category is not grounds for deletion. Gandalf61 (talk) 18:46, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, while it's true that a normal encyclopedia would not contain such an article, normal encyclopedias also tend to have lighter main articles in the first place, both in terms of amount of content and depth. We could limit ourselves as such, and thus need only one article. Or, we could the depth of interesting material that we've got currently, and split off a simpler introduction article to ease laypeople into it (ie. the article in question). Considering that Wikipedia has (essentially) unlimited space for text, as well as an active community which consists of tens or hundreds of thousands of users, both of which are limitations for a normal encyclopedia (space required for an article and time devoted), I don't see why we don't simply go with the second option. Written properly it doesn't fail WP:V, and it's only borderline for WP:NOT - 206.126.163.20 (talk) 01:19, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- Fabrictramp (talk) 16:04, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, the article could be improved, but AfD isn't cleanup. No clear reason for deletion has been proposed beyond "I don't like/can't see the point of it". However, this is certainly a notable topic. As to introductory articles, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Introduction to evolution (2nd nomination) for a general discussion of the utility of this class of articles. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:12, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note, I've rewritten the introduction, but I'm hesitant to do too much work on the article if there is a chance that it will be deleted. Tim Vickers (talk) 22:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Introductory articles on certain technical topics of wide interest are acceptable on Wikipedia, judging from previous deletion and featured article nominations. --Itub (talk) 10:12, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]