Talk:Encephalomalacia

This topic is being edited as an assignment in an undergraduate neurobiology course. The course is participating in the Wikipedia Education Program. The revised article will be posted by March 24, 2014.

Note to Reviewers

Our topic did not have much information as a pathology with detailed physiology, but more as a symptom of other diseases. Also most of the sources revolved around case studies and that were mainly descriptions (some very old sources). We have done our best to take the most relevant information from these and paint a neutral comprehensive picture of this affliction.SCarolina55 (talk) 02:10, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Primary Review #1

After doing some of my own looking on Google searching this topic, there really isn't much info to work with, so in that regard this article is well done. And, considering the not to reviewers, you followed your plan. I'm sure you haven't had a chance to get to it, but a picture would definitely be helpful. Even if a picture on cerebral softening can't be found, a picture of the brain would be supplementative to the article. I would say to make sure and go through the article and proof-read some sentences and fix some grammatical issues. There were times where "a" and "the" were left out. I would say that you could hyperlink many more words in this article. There are some words that I had no clue what they were and had to google them, so linking more terms would be a huge plus. You could move the first sentence under the Later Life heading up to the Early Life heading because this is more of a point for early life cerebral softening. A suggestion I would give is instead of using the heading Affected Areas, you could use Cerebral Softening Types, or something to that effect because that is essentially what you are describing below it with Red, Yellow, etc. This is just a suggestion though. Another suggestion would be, especially because your group focused on documented cases, you could talk about treatments for people who have this condition

You did well with the http://0-www.bmj.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/content/1/1933/140 source. There would be a ton to say on this, but you covered the gist of the woman's symptoms. You cited it correctly and you properly executed what the original author was trying to get across. There weren't really any other points in the source that would have helped out your article, so you're find in that regard.I just don't know if this is a secondary article because the person that wrote this article was in direct observation of the woman. I would ask Dr. Mynlieff on this one just to be sure.

Hopefully this review helped in some way. Overall, good work! I know it seems like I'm bashing the article, but your group did well with the topic considering the lack of info to choose from.

Thank you JamesBond34 (talk) 00:12, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Primary Review #2

Considering the scarcity of information on this disease, I think you guys did a very good job. I was particularly impressed with the amount of references that you guys found, given that there isn't much on this topic. I particularly reviewed the article: "Neonatal polycystic encephalomalacia: four new cases and review of the literature", and I think you guys used its information pretty well. My only issue is that I doubt that it is a secondary article; it seems like it is primary, instead. Although, I understand that there isn't many secondary articles on the topic, I would suggest you guys check with Dr. Mynlieff on whether you should use the information in the above article.

I also noticed that in your lead section there was a "medical citation needed" note. You guys might want to work on that. Also, you guys might want to go back hyperlink a little bit more in your article. For instance, you have words such as: hypoxia, anoxia, and convulsions (to name a few) that, I think, would be better hyper-linked because I had to go back and Google them myself.

In addition, "hemorrhage" under the section "stroke" had a few minor grammatical mistakes. There were sentences that could have used a comma. Furthermore, the "documented cases" section could use a little bit more hyperlinks, and I also noticed a few misspelled words in that section.

All in all, I think you guys did a great job considering information on this topic was hard to come across. I would suggest that you guys proofread the article thoroughly, and check your articles one more time to be sure.

Thank you,

Ngakona (talk) 23:10, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Primary Review #3

Overall I think you did a good job given how little information there was on the topic. After reading this article, I feel that I have a solid base knowledge of cerebral softening and could maybe even explain it to someone else.

A few things I would edit, I know this was already stated but I also feel that you could link more terms specifically, "hypoxia" and "anoxia" under the stroke category. Also, I think you could put the "affected areas" section between the "Causes" and "Documented Cases" sections. I think your article may flow better this way as the affected areas is helping to explain what exactly you are talking about. Also, you may want to rename this heading. Maybe something like "Types of Softening" and then the subcategories you could rename to "Red Softening," "Yellow Softening," etc. I just think Affected Areas isn't an appropriate title when your subcategories are adjectives that describe the areas as opposed the actual areas. I did appreciate how you laid out the "Documented Cases" and "Stages" sections.

The article I reviews was the "Pathophysiology of Stroke" article. I think you utilized it very well. It was a secondary source but also very dense. However, I think if you took too much more from it, you may have overwhelmed your article and sidetracked off of the main purpose. One thing I noticed with your sources and I'm not sure if you can change, is linking. Is there anyway you could link the URL's of the sources so instead of copying and pasting I could just click the link to get to the article? Finally, not sure if this is correct in the situations but do you need a page number for the source? The article I read was a PDF and while I did read the entire article I would have liked to have been able to first see exactly where you pulled your citation from.

Again, I think you did a good job. The only editing needs are minor and will be easily fixed. Way to go!!

8466jacoba (talk) 03:48, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Primary Review #4

I thought you guys were able to form a good article with the limited information you can find on this topic. The article does have a few grammatical errors. I would make sure to reread through all the sections to fix the minor errors. When comparing this article to other Wikipedia articles there are very few hyperlinks. I would try to include many more hyperlinks within the article. Some of the medical terms you use will be difficult for most Wikipedia readers to understand so I would either define these terms or hyperlink them. The only formatting change I would make is moving the documented cases to be the last section. This way the reader has information about the disorder and can apply them to the documented cases. I would also include a picture of the brain for the readers to visualize what they are reading. I looked over the Transient And Recurring Paresis Inacute Cerebral Softening article. I think you used this source very well. It qualifies as a secondary source. Overall, I think you did a great job writing the article. It flows very easily and it very informative. --Tgmarquette (talk) 02:46, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review #1

I thought you guys did a good job of fully describing a disease that didn't have a large amount of review articles/information on it. Some suggestions I have are: 1. You might want to include a citation in the opening paragraph of your article, since you provide some important information on the types and causes of this disease without any reference to where you found the info. 2. Adding in additional links to other Wikipedia article could help readers who don't have a scientific background (for example: embolic ischemia, hypoxia, and asphyxia) 3. I might consider moving the section on documented cases after the sections on stages and affected areas. (Since you refer to specific types of softening within these cases, it might be helpful for readers to have already read about red vs white vs yellow). Hopefully these suggests help. Overall, nice job! Syeager.93 (talk) 22:16, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review

This article was well done and covers an appropriate amount of information. That being said, I suggest moving the “See also” section to above references like the majority of Wikipedia articles have it placed and remove the neuroscience stub statement at the bottom of the article. I agree with the secondary review above about using more Wikilinks to help improve the page. The only other suggestion is adding an image of cerebral softening. I did a quick Goggle search and some images that you could use came up, which would improve the page. Sargento21 (talk) 04:45, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review

You did a good job describing a topic even though it doesn't seem like there is a lot of information out there. As another reviewer suggested, I would put the documented cases last. I did like that section because it gave insight into the symptoms of cerebral softening. I agree with the suggestions to add more links to this page. Also, your first link directs back to this page, so it is unnecessary. Otherwise, you did a good job with what little information was out there. LJ112358 (talk) 05:09, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review

You did a good job overall, I was wondering about the types of stroke and what relevant information was in this topic section that is not covered on the wikipage for stroke. There are various minor grammatical errors that could be tuned up but other than that the other reviewers seemed to have hit the same other problems that I could see. Keep up the good work! Jammin1993 (talk) 16:04, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review

I thought your page was very good! I didn't see any blatant errors except that your intro paragraph did not have any citation attached to it. One other thing I would suggest would be to add a picture or two to show the different types of cerebral softening. It is relatively easy to add pictures to your page. A great source for easy pictures to post is Wikipedia Commons. Overall, the sections were broken up well, you used many sources, and it was easy to understand. Good job! --Thatsomaven (talk) 00:47, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Secondary Review

I found your article to have nice flow and provide a good amount of information. The way you broke up your sections made it especially easy to follow. The only thing I'd change (as some other reviewers pointed out) is to rearrange your sections slightly, so that the documented cases follow the causes and symptoms. Overall, you did a great job! AleksNemo (talk) 05:02, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Authors' Note to Primary Reviewers

Response to Primary Review #1

Thank you very much for the review and the help. We appreciate the acknowledgement that there was little to be found in terms of material on our topic. Originally we did not include a picture because there was no open source picture that depicted cerebral softening and we thought the inclusion of a different depiction would only serve to confuse. However, we decided because of your input that we would include a picture of a similar MRI view of the brain. We thought you were also right about the worthwhile addition of more links. However, as far as the shifting of the sentence, we thought that it provided a nice segue from early life into later life if we mentioned the contrast between the two first, so we decided to keep that as is. We did, though, use your criticism of the heading title and changed it accordingly. As far as treatments go, there is really no way to regenerate softened areas. The people in the documented cases all experienced deteriorating health as a result, so we cannot include any sort of remedies. For our sources, we do acknowledge that they are vastly primary with only a few being secondary. Of course, this is not the preference of the Wikipedia community. We did meet with Dr. Mynlieff very early on in this project and spoke about the lack of secondary material. We tried to strive for as many secondary sources as possible, but relying on only these few would not have made a complete article on the condition of cerebral softening, so we had to include primary sources and case studies to compensate for the lack of information. Perhaps if more material comes to light in the future in the form of secondary sources, the necessary changes and citations can be made and replaced but at the present time this would not be possible. We did not feel as though you were bashing our article at all, rather we very much appreciate your thorough and helpful review. Thanks again. JBMarquette (talk) 20:03, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Response to Primary Review #2

Thank you for your time to review our topic. We have confirmed with Dr. Mynlieff that the sources we used were credible. The medical citation needed was fixed, the sections rearranged to flow better, more links added, and grammar assessed and changed accordingly to the best of our abilities.SCarolina55 (talk) 06:06, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Response to Primary Review #3

First of all, we would like to thank you for taking the time to review our page and providing us with useful suggestions. We have addressed most of your suggestions and believe they do enhance our page. For one, we have added links throughout the page to better help the reader understand the meaning of certain words and terms. Your suggestion on rearranging our sections was very useful and we indeed changed the order. That along with the change in title of "Affected Areas" to "Types of Softening" seems to allow for better flow and understanding of the various parts. We also agreed on your suggestion of adding "Softening" in the headings for the types of softening. We are currently looking into linking the references to make them URLs. The problem is that most of our references have limited access to people logged into Marquette's network, so linking them would be superfluous. Therefore, we only linked article that are universally accessible. I have seen on other pages that some references are linked while others are not. The last thing is our response to your suggestion about the page numbers. We used info from the first 7 pages of that source which is the only content in that article and that information was was found under each respective heading, so when a reader is looking to that source for the information we used it would be relatively easy to locate since it coincides with the headings. We are working on adding in page numbers for our sources. Thank you for your suggestions, they have been very helpful. User:LucasTichawa

Response to Primary Review #4

Thank you for your review of our page and the comments you have provided. We have edited the paper for grammar errors and added hyperlinks. These two areas seem to have been an issue for all of our reviewers, but have been resolved. We have also rearranged our sections and have placed "Documented Cases" last. A picture has been added and I believe is a great addition to the page. Thank you for your review of our source and the comments you provided on its use, as well as for your review of our page as a whole. User:LucasTichawa

Is this an archaic concept?

"Red" "yellow" "white"...kind of reminiscent of the 4 humours. There is no information as to how these entities are diagnosed (only at autopsy?), or what they signify in modern medicine. This article I find useless, and probably indicative of a lack of interest in the topic on the part of medical science. An expert would be able to bridge the gap between the ancient "color system" and modern brain pathology. Any experts out there? --Quisqualis (talk) 02:53, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Name change reason

It seems encephalomalacia is the more appropriate term for this medically. I am wondering if there is history why Cerebral softening is the corrent name and encephalomalacia redirects to it, rather than the reverse (encephalomalacia as article name and cerebral softening redirecting to it). I think encephalomalacia much better meets the medicine article (WP:criteria) "The article title should be the scientific or recognised medical name that is most commonly used in recent, high-quality, English-language medical sources, rather than a lay term" Pokeswap (talk) 15:23, 17 April 2024 (UTC)