Wikipedia:Peer review/Theobromine/archive1

This article has been certified as a Good Article, and personally, I think it's the best article that I have been involved in. What is needed to bone this up for FAC? MessedRocker (talk) 15:09, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article needs a lot of work. For example, the sections pharmacology, clinical uses, and effects have a lot of duplicate material and I get no feeling of organization. I actually considered applying a cleanup tag to this article because after the lead, it is basically a disjointed list of facts, some of which are repeated several times. This material needs to be written in paragraphs which explain the content to the reader. The article is way too short; it probably needs at least twice the content it has now. Some more specifics:
  • Fill in the Smiles and other fields in the infobox
"It has a similar, but lesser, effect to caffeine, making it a lesser homologue."
  • Be more precise here, specify the similar effects and their severity. I know what a homologue is, but what is a "lesser" homologe? The article mentions that theobromine stimulates the heart more than caffeine but the CNS effects are lower. So why is it a "lesser" homologue?
  • Using clarifications, such as "vasodilator (a blood vessel widener)" you don't have to put clarification in parenthesis after a term, that is what a wikilink is for. Same for "edema."
  • Redundancy, for example "Theobromine is an isomer of theophylline" which is mentioned at least twice, and "Theobromine is categorized as a dimethyl xanthine" which is mentioned at least three times.
  • "Theobromine was first isolated from the seeds of the cacao tree in 1878[10] and then shortly afterwards was synthesized..." How shortly afterwards?
  • Remove redundant words: "It is in the methylxanthine class of chemical compounds,[3] which also includes the similar compounds theophylline and caffeine." How about "It is a methylxanthine, like theopyhlline and caffeine"
  • "Theobromine is known to induce gene mutations..." bad phrasing. Usually when you hear the phrase: "...is known to..." or "...was shown to be involved in..." it means that a single study found a correlation; if many studies confirm the same result writers will not use this weak phrase. I wouldn't take a single study like this very seriously, but if you include in the article you should at least tie it into the rest of the article instead of just laying it out there.
Not to discourage you, but the article really needs a lot of work. Jeff Dahl 23:30, 30 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]