Folding Forum

Hi,

If you have a moment, I would appreciate anyone proofreading the Folding@home article on Wikipedia, which is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home. I've been working on it since early August, and it's looking a lot better than it was back then (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =442940409) and my goal is to soon get it up to Wikipedia's Good Article criteria, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GACR) which specifically are:

A good article is-
Well-written:
(a) the prose is clear and concise, respects copyright laws, and the spelling and grammar are correct; and
(b) it complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
Factually accurate and verifiable:
(a) it provides references to all sources of information in the section(s) dedicated to the attribution of these sources according to the guide to layout;
(b) it provides in-line citations from reliable sources for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines; and
(c) it contains no original research.
Broad in its coverage:
(a) it addresses the main aspects of the topic; and
(b) it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without bias, giving due weight to each.
Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
Illustrated, if possible, by images:
(a) images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content; and
(b) images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.

I believe its very close to fitting under these criteria, although it may already. That's why I'm asking you please read it over and let me know what you think could be improved, or of course you could fix things yourself.

It would be really nice to have a Good F@h article. After all, F@h rather deserves one IMO, and it gets rid of the typical annoyances of reading a half-baked Wikipedia article. The page gets about 400 views a day from all over the world, and I know that if I had just heard about the project I would quite likely try to look it up on Wikipedia. Additionally, with a solid article, overhaul of critical areas of the F@h website (viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19643#p195710), and v7 solving all the client-choosing craziness, there will be a whole lot less stopping any newcomers.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can supply. It's one step at a time, but perhaps with your help we can soon get it up past Good to a Featured status, just like good ol' Rosetta@home.

Jesse V.

I looked through the whole page and made some relatively minor edits. My major gripe was a couple of statements about future development of the PS3 client; since the PS3 client is unlikely to get another update, I just removed them.

I too would like to see it get Featured status.

What is with the results listing there? Are these needed?

Zagen30 wrote:My major gripe was a couple of statements about future development of the PS3 client; since the PS3 client is unlikely to get another update, I just removed them.

I'll take your word on that; you obviously have much more experience than I do. Could you point me to some official statements of that? As you probably noticed, those update statements were cited from various pages in the official F@h website. If they are not true they ought to be removed from the website as well. The website is getting a little dated in places, and could do with some cleaning, but I was under the assumption that everything on it especially relating to software was true. If there are no plans to update the PS3 I think that should be included in the article, but otherwise I'd like to go with what the website says.

Thanks for all those fixes you made. Just what I was looking for!

I did change "with multiple supported pieces of hardware" to "multiple processor units". I know you mean to include the GPU. Hopefully "processor units" is ambiguous enough to include that.

Ivoshiee wrote:What is with the results listing there? Are these needed?

Well they've been there since February 29 2008. They were added by Johnnaylor, who is currently the user with the most edits to the article. I think they are good to have there, because I want to convey how productive F@h actually is. I like the list since all the links are all there and a large majority of the articles are publicly available. However, it may not comply with F@h's policy on List Inclusion, and may be holding this article back, I'm not sure. I'm not entirely positive what should be done. Should I get rid of the list entirely, or dump it into a new Wikipedia article? I wouldn't want to get rid of it, and it would be a big task to summarize each paper based on its Summary and Abstract, but it could be done. I could also do the summary in a new Wikipedia article, as I did with the Cores, but when I started the "Folding@home cores" article all the admins came swooping in and flagged the article and my userpage as spam advertisement, and seemed to imply that if I didn't get the article up to par with Wikipedia standards it would be deleted. So I'm not all enthusiastic about that option, but it could be done if you guys think so.

Let me know what you think should be done. I may not have time this coming week to do a whole lot of work on it, as I have midterms coming up. After they're over I'll likely be hiding indoors and can make any big improvements, as the Zombie Apocalypse will strike USU campus in a few days. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_vs._Zombies)

Thanks for the feedback!

Well, Bruce closed the PS3 enhancements thread due to nobody from the Sony team paying any attention to it. While it's not exactly an official statement, if you look at nrimon's post history (he's one of the PS3 developers), the post he made this past August was his first in almost 2 years, and it had nothing to do with potential updates.

Zagen30 wrote:Well, Bruce closed the PS3 enhancements thread due to nobody from the Sony team paying any attention to it. While it's not exactly an official statement, if you look at nrimon's post history (he's one of the PS3 developers), the post he made this past August was his first in almost 2 years, and it had nothing to do with potential updates.

Hmm. All right. Thanks.
In that case I think those statements should be removed from the website.
Too bad development of the PS3 client is kind of stalled. It might be helpful if some of those changes were implemented.

Why work on a PS3 console when the PS3+1 replacement is already in development?

7im wrote:Why work on a PS3 console when the PS3+1 replacement is already in development?

I haven't heard of this "PS3+1" thing. But it should be worked on because people are going to have this PS3 console for some time before everyone upgrades to "PS3+1". Similar to having F@h clients support XP/2000/98/95. I guess the PS3 client is working fairly well as is, so there's not a huge rush to update it. It's just that v7 is fixing lots of things for computer users, so it'd be nice to have similar (but of course smaller) fixes taken care of for the gamers.

In any case, regardless of the future of the PS3 client(s), I'd like to get the Wikipedia article well written from official statements. Since I've seen you fix the website before, if its true that PS3 client development has no plans, I would hope futuristic statements won't be misleading anyone else. Thanks.

Have you read the article? Does it meet the criteria? Have any suggestions?

Yes, they are working on V7, but they stoppped working on v6 fah clients. Sony is likely doing the same. Working in the "PS3 replacement" game console and related software instead of working on the PS3. Same kind of thing.

I don't say PS4 like some other people. The number 4 is considered bad luck. It will likely be called something else, IMO.

No, I haven't read it recently. Probably won't have time to for another week or 2. I only pop over here on breaks, lunch, etc, when I have projects due, and Q4 projects are due.

Ivoshiee wrote:What is with the results listing there? Are these needed?

Actually, I just had this idea: I/we could note the results from each paper based on its Abstract and Summary and then cite the paper. That way the article still reads in Summary Style but the list of all the papers are all there in the References section. Easy reading + preservation of the list. Where the journals are being selfish and not freely releasing the papers, we could cite the F@h Results page as well as the non-available paper. Thoughts about this or is there a better idea?

Thoughts about improvements in other areas is also very welcome. Thanks.

I believe all of the articles are available, they're just not free. The journals are very protective of their rights to make money in the same way they have been doing for years, but that's not the same as the paper being "non-avalable" If you have a nearby university library, you can probably get access to the journals, themselves. Otherwise, you'll probably have to wait until the copyright expires.

Oh, and please ignore the ratings at the bottom of the article. I have reason to believe that they are broken and glitched or something. I swear a couple days they were full marks across the board, and then recently they seemed to have crashed. I know that reviews expire, so that might be to blame. In the time between the full-marks and super-low score, I didn't make any controversial changes or do anything that would reasonably cause everyone to hate the article all of sudden. I don't know what's going on there. But it doesn't matter, I'm just trying to improve the article's writing overall. Wikipedia can debug their own straw pole system without affecting the writing.

So we/I can just carry on with the suggestions. Keep them coming please!

Regarding published papers, I recall Prof Pande mentioning that some of the papers become publically available after a year. <search pause here> http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19320

I think there needs to be a better "hook" at the end of the first paragraph. It ends with a summarizing goal, but does really say why that is a good goal to have. The first paragraph is also very heavy in regards to terminology, so ending the paragraph with a simpler hook would doubly help the article.

Folding@home ("Folding at Home", FAH, F@h) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics, and to improve on the methods available to do so.[7] It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande.[8] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[9] Insert hook here

The main page of the fah web site continues this goals idea with this paragraph...

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

And this is why half a million clients fold every day. Hopefully the work we do here will lead to a treatment or cure for one or more of these diseases. The life we save may be our own, and/or a direct member of our family.

If that paragraph doesn't wrap up with explaining WHY we want to "understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases" in very simple terms, FAH will continue to look like a giant and complex lab experiment instead of an easy and fun way to make a worthy contribution to science.

We may even want to use slightly less heavy terminology in the first paragraph as not to chase people away after trying to wade through reading the very first sentence.

And if you can't work in a hook at the end of P1, then we certainly MUST do it in P2 or P3 where goals are discussed again, and it still doesn't say anything about folding to find cures.

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I also can't stand that Ginormous contents table and huge white space that it causes. Shorten that damn thing, right justify it, or remove it completely.

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You pulled the cores out to a new page, so you should probably pull the papers out to a separate page as well. Or keep the current year's papers, and refer to past years in that 2nd page.

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And nowhere does it mention how F@h blazes the client development trail, like how it was the first project to support a truely multi-threaded SMP client, not just running multiple single threaded clients like BOINC originally did. Or first to have a GPU DC client, or the first DC client on the PS3. Or how fah continues to support a wide range of client and hardware types to make it easier for people to contribute. Or how fah has the most published papers of any DC project.

Or if it does mention those things, it should mention it more, as I missed it while skimming the article.

Score some more points for the home team.

7im wrote:I think there needs to be a better "hook" at the end of the first paragraph. It ends with a summarizing goal, but does really say why that is a good goal to have. The first paragraph is also very heavy in regards to terminology, so ending the paragraph with a simpler hook would doubly help the article.

Folding@home ("Folding at Home", FAH, F@h) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics, and to improve on the methods available to do so.[7] It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande.[8] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."[9] Insert hook here

The main page of the fah web site continues this goals idea with this paragraph...

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

And this is why half a million clients fold every day. Hopefully the work we do here will lead to a treatment or cure for one or more of these diseases. The life we save may be our own, and/or a direct member of our family.

If that paragraph doesn't wrap up with explaining WHY we want to "understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases" in very simple terms, FAH will continue to look like a giant and complex lab experiment instead of an easy and fun way to make a worthy contribution to science.

We may even want to use slightly less heavy terminology in the first paragraph as not to chase people away after trying to wade through reading the very first sentence.

And if you can't work in a hook at the end of P1, then we certainly MUST do it in P2 or P3 where goals are discussed again, and it still doesn't say anything about folding to find cures.

Will fix ASAP. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. You are quite right. This is exactly why I'm asking for other readers!

7im wrote: I also can't stand that Ginormous contents table and huge white space that it causes. Shorten that damn thing, right justify it, or remove it completely.

I'm not sure what can be done here. I have to keep it, for its a required component of the article. I'll check other Good and Featured article and see what they do. I never really noticed it before but there is a lot of whitespace now that you mention it.

7im wrote: You pulled the cores out to a new page, so you should probably pull the papers out to a separate page as well. Or keep the current year's papers, and refer to past years in that 2nd page.

Perhaps. I'll see if it gets too big. There are certainly a lot of results, so one could in theory develop a decent article just on them. But perhaps not a whole lot of people are interested in editing such a page other than me. But that's a later problem. Here is my current plan: make the list go instead to the citations section. To do that I will be pulling out key points from each paper, summarizing the paper, and talking about its significance. This would be much more appropriate than a bit list of journals that doesn't say much on the surface. Its a big project, so I'll probably wait until this coming weekend to start work on it. If the section grows too large, I'll see about moving it off as well, because it would be a good idea in that case.

7im wrote: And nowhere does it mention how F@h blazes the client development trail, like how it was the first project to support a truely multi-threaded SMP client, not just running multiple single threaded clients like BOINC originally did. Or first to have a GPU DC client, or the first DC client on the PS3. Or how fah continues to support a wide range of client and hardware types to make it easier for people to contribute. Or how fah has the most published papers of any DC project.

Or if it does mention those things, it should mention it more, as I missed it while skimming the article.

Actually it does. See the last sentence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F@H#High_p ... _platforms. The papers statement is stated in the last paragraph of the lead. But still, your right it should be more obvious. As for the "make it easier for people to contribute", I got the impression that that that wasn't the purpose. Otherwise they would have stuck with a uniprocessor that supported all OSs. I thought the first paragraph of the High Performance Client section explains it well. Do you have a better way of saying it or something?

Also, can you point me to some statements supporting the fact that F@h was the first to use SMP and PS3 for distributed computing? I found a blog post by Dr. Pande that says that F@h was the first to use GPUs, and currently the only references I have of the SMP and PS3 claims are from you. In no way am I questioning the statements, I fully believe them. However, as seen in the article's Talk page there was some concern expressed for "heavy reliance on forum posts by seemingly non-authoritative people. Unless a forum post is made by a project scientist (e.g., Vijay Pande), I don't think it would pass muster as a reliable source". I've citations to forum posts also to Bruce and Kasson and others, but many have you as the author. Now, I for one believe that you are a reliable source. But they don't seem to think so, and I'm not sure how to convince them otherwise. So unless you put some flags up indicating yourself as a PG member or something, I've got to get some other references for that if this article is going to pass GA criteria. Don't get me wrong, I really do believe you. I'm just going to need some sources by authors who are marked as reliable to satisfy Wikipedia reviewers.

Thanks very much for the suggestion.