Brinaluvsrocks

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Hello, Brinaluvsrocks, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:45, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Drastic and unannounced changes to Abiogenesis: a few comments

Hi, and thanks for your efforts to improve Wikipedia, very rare among student compelled to do coursework here.

However, your changes today are to say the least drastic, increasing the article's length by over 20,000 bytes to an unwieldy 200,000 bytes. I mention length because when I brought the article to "Good Article" status, I took considerable pains to shorten the text (I got it down to a more-or-less bearable 160,000 from a dreadfully overloaded 314,000 bytes, something I hope I will never see again in any article. So I'm not exactly chuffed to see a 10% rise in one short session.

Leaving aside your editorial decisions about content for the moment, I'd like to draw your attention to the "Main article:" and "Further information:" links at the top of almost every section of the article. This is a sign of a mature and well-developed subject area: the "Abiogenesis" article is at the top of a hierarchy of many subsidiary articles. Only the most essential points should be made in the top-level article, for the good reasons that it must be kept short, and it is meant to summarize the key points of the rest of the hierarchy. "New" materials should, therefore, nearly always be added to subsidiary articles, not right up here. If theory has drastically changed, then large changes, perhaps the addition of whole articles, should take place further down; and then a brief summary of the changes should filter its way slowly upwards, a major area of research perhaps causing one or two sentences to be rewritten at the top of the tree (because, after all, the whole of the history of the subject up to that point remains historically valid).

One way that the article's length was brought under control was by putting a considerable amount of material into a list-like article called Alternative abiogenesis scenarios. This covers

1 Environments

    1.1 Fluctuating salinity: dilute and dry-down
    1.2 Hot freshwater lakes
    1.3 Geothermal springs
    1.4 Deep sea alkaline vents
    1.5 Volcanic ash in the ocean
    1.6 Gold's deep-hot biosphere
    1.7 Radioactive beach hypothesis
    1.8 The hypercycle

2 Biochemistry

    2.1 Fox proteinoids
    2.2 Protein amyloid
    2.3 First protein that condenses substrates during thermal cycling: thermosynthesis
    2.4 Pre-RNA world: The ribose issue and its bypass
    2.5 Autocatalysis
    2.6 Synthesis based on hydrogen cyanide
    2.7 Simulated chemical pathways

3 Viral origin
4 Encapsulation without a membrane

    4.1 Polyester droplets
    4.2 Proteinoid microspheres

5 Jeewanu protocell
6 RNA-DNA world

It may well be that many of your additions might be better placed in that article.

I'm not a person to stand on ceremony, but it is the case that a Good Article has been through a formal review process, so not only has it involved substantial work, but it has had some kind of approval stamped upon it. This does not mean it can't be changed – everything in an encyclopedia, like everything in science, can be modified given sufficient evidence. What it does mean is that change should be carefully considered, and made in the most appropriate place. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:43, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi and thank you for your input. I appreciate the time and effort you have put into making this page what it is and I think it has excellent flow. If you looked at the additions I made, they were mainly to the scenarios for an origin of life as I found the primary hypotheses were not addressed. Moreover, theories like 'clay', 'Iron-sulfur world', and 'zinc world' were not really geologic scenarios, so it made more sense to put them under actual environmental settings where they can be found. I also removed Nick Lane's 'A Scenario', as this made very little sense to include seeing in that it is one scientist's view on the origin of life which doesn't seem like it belonged on the primary page. I understand your concern of adding too much content, but when that content addresses the most popular hypotheses for an origin of life, it seems appropriate to keep them on the main Abiogenesis page. I had thoughts about moving the theories of clay, iron-sulfur world, and zinc world to the Alternative Abiogenesis Scenarios as these seem to not fit in, so if you are looking for areas to cut down on I would suggest moving those. I just didn't want to remove other contributors' input and I thought these theories were quite interesting ones to add to the page. But again, not the main theories. Brinaluvsrocks (talk) 02:36, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. The concern is not exactly "too much content", but "sudden large unevaluated student additions", something which I'd have thought was undeniably the case. I don't know how your contributions are assessed, but given that they involve a shared, indeed worldwide resource, I'd have thought that the marking scheme for any very large change ought to involve some consideration of the quality of the process of introducing and discussing changes of any size. Anyway, I see that you endorse my call for editors to take a look at the changes. Your suggestion seems a good one; I've moved the three oldie sections to Alternative abiogenesis scenarios. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:27, 11 December 2023 (UTC)