Talk:Osteonecrosis of the jaw

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Osteonecrosis of the jaw (reviewed version) has been listed as a good article under the good-article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do.
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This article was selected on the Medicine portal as one of Wikipedia's best articles related to Medicine.

[edit] Copyedit to article and observations for development

User:Dr. Imbeau well done on creating such a full and well cited article. I've had a brief copyedit over the article:

Spaces: remove duplicate, spaces immediate after and before opening/closing brackets, spaces between reference links
Repeated use of the same reference can be marked-up as a duplicate of the same link in the cite.php system (see WP:FOOTNOTES).
- Essentially give each reference a name, so for the first occurrence of a citation: <ref name="xxx"> details </ref>
  The actual name need not be in double-quotes unless it contains a space, but most authors do so out of habit.
- Then for subsequent occurrences either use the whole markup again, or as cite.php ignores all the details on subsequent identically named refs, just <ref name="xxx"/>
  The shortened version is obviously easier to remember and re-use later in the text, but it does require a fully defined first occurrence of the citation. Should a later edit/editor remove the first occurrence, then the subsequent duplicates will just show as a number and a link character (e.g. 24 ^) and all details of the citation are lost. Using the full form for each occurrence is cumbersome, but deletion of the first occurrence does not affect subsequent occurrences.
If one can look up and find an article abstract in PubMed (search link is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi). Then if one takes the abstract number into Dibberi's tool at http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/templates (remember to ensure set for PubMed ID option), it will generate the markup for the Template:cite journal giving a consistent format for citations (other citation templates include Template:cite web, Template:cite book,Template:cite news etc).

The article is very detailed and needs a more general tweak of style:

Simpler introduction to the aetiology. Perhaps with the "simple" introduction under the main "Aetiology" heading and the greater detail under "Pathophysiology" sub-heading.
Medical jargon terms are used without definition for the lay reader. It is not the place within this article of course to give full definitions of terms. Options are greater use of wikilinks, brief phrase definition e.g. "tissue death (necrosis)" or a general rephrasing (these 3 appraoches in turn to "trabeculae", "non-suppurative" and "In healthy bone these cells are constantly replaced by differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSC)").
Wikipedia is not an undergraduate or post-graduate textbook. This article, in its current form, will not get close to being Wikipedia:Good articles status, let alone the target of Wikipedia:Featured articles.
It is not so much that the points raised are excessively high-brow, just that it is difficult as a professional to write at the level of the lay-reader, rather than one's contemporaries - all medical/dental professionals encounter this in wikipedia, myself included :-)
So what level should one write for - primary school? high-school? or an under-graduate ? My view is that it is wrong to target any specific group, but rather to be inclusive of them all. Hence there is a general approach of starting simply and slowly adding in levels of details. This helps define core principles before dwelling on fine points of uncertainty. It also means that the younger readers can get a grasp of a topic, even if details later in an article extend beyond their needs in reading about a topic. My personal viewpoint is that articles should stop at a level of a good thorough undergraduate (this is after all a general encyclopaedia).

So really great start to an article on a topic I knew little about. I will try reading it more deeply when I have a chance (vs very quickly and with view of copyedit & initial wikifying). It will need some adjustment of tone/writing style for the wider wikipedia non-specialist readership (perhaps greater division of those long paragraphs, or use of subheadings?). David Ruben ^Talk 13:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GAC

I judged this article on the following 7 criteria:

Well-written: Pass
Factually accurate: Pass
Broad: Pass
Neutrally written: Pass
Stable: Pass
Well-referenced: Pass
Images: Pass

Congratulations, it passes! I had to think a long time before passing this article, because it's obviously written by a medical professional (the Dr. in your username is a bit of a tip-off), and the subject matter is such that it is incredibly hard for a lay reader to understand. In the end though, I decided to pass it, because every single medical term is wikilinked, the lead is absolutely brilliant in explaining what's going on to anyone, and frankly, you can't describe this subject without using a lot of medical terms. Like I said though, the lead explains anything a lay reader would want to know, and the article itself is great, not to mention incredibly well-referenced. I'd suggest pushing this article to FAC if you want/have time, but there will probably be a fight about the reading level. Once again, congratulations on a great article! --PresN 17:05, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] UK increased awareness - BMJ/BNF

Having followed the development of this article about a condition I had never previously heard of, two items worthy of mention that will (or at least should) increase awareness.

Latest edition of British National Formulary (September 2006, but only just now being distributed to all UK NHS doctors, surgeries and hospitals) adds in the leader section on biphosphonates a whole subsection paragraph on ONj. Its wording (re mostly with higher dose of iv therapy and to sort out potential sites of infection first) is almost identical to that of the paper by Woo this year.
Latest edition of the British Medical Journal has an article on ONj.
- Landis B, Richter M, Dojcinovic I, Hugentobler M (2006). "Osteonecrosis of the jaw after treatment with bisphosphonates: is irreversible, so the focus must be on prevention.". BMJ 333 (7576): 982-3. PMID 17095762.
- The BMJ link to extract is here, from where the Rapid Responses can be read (and the whole article if one has a subscription). David Ruben ^Talk 23:59, 14 November 2006 (UTC)