Talk:Obesity

Eduzendium

Just to let you know that several themes related to appetite and obesity will be developed by students as part of an Eduzendium project from september until december 09 (U00984) Appetite and Obesity, University of Edinburgh 2009. Celine Caquineau 16:03, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Disambig

Would Fat (body mass) be an inappropriate redirect? --Robert W King 23:08, 8 October 2007 (CDT)

Wouldn't Body mass index be more appropriate? And actually, it sounds like it should be a separate article. Chris Day (talk) 23:14, 8 October 2007 (CDT)

Intro

This article needs a lede/intro. --Robert W King 09:13, 13 March 2008 (CDT)

Regarding removal of abstracts & excerpts from citation

Robert, I must express how sad I feel about your removal of abstracts and excerpts that I had included for some of the citations. My comments:

Your stated reason for removing them, the warning about article length. I did not know that CZ imposes a limit on article length. Can you direct me to the warning site.

I used to see warnings about some browsers unable to handle articles beyond a certain byte number. I have looked at very long articles in the following browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera -- none of which had trouble displaying very long articles. I will test further by creating a humongus article in a sandbox.

Including abstracts, or portions of them, and excerpts, and explanatory notes, in the 'Reference' section, gives the readers extra value, if they want it, without disturbing the flow of the text in the main article. Extra value in the form of information, enriching the article. Abstracts and excerpts help the reader to decide whether to consult the citation, perhaps encouraging her to do so, CZ thereby enhancing its pedagogical goal.

If the lengths of the abstracts/excerpts put you off, I'd gladly shorten them, but I'd rather give the reader more than less and at the same time obviate her need to leave the CZ article to consult the original citation, perhaps at least delaying it until she's finished reading the main CZ article.

Personally, I'd like to include at least a short annotation for every citation listed, as extra informational value for the reader. Anthony.Sebastian 17:38, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Anthony, I must disagree strongly, for this is a human interaction issue, not a length issue -- or at least should be considered such. Your paradigm is a perfectly good one for a printed book that has footnotes, rather than endnotes.

It's a very bad one for web documents when many notes are purely bibliographic. Here's the problem: if most notes are bibliographic, the reader is unlikely to click on them -- so the annotation is never seen. It is seen if the article is printed, but it is not seen when viewed on the screen.

From a web design standpoint, if you want the annotations to be seen, provide wikilinks, not numbered references, to them. Several approaches come to mind. In some cases, they could be lemmas or short articles. You could also use a subpage (Addendum?) and use section links (e.g., article/subpage#label of annotation|Additional detail on subject-of-annotation}} As you are recommending, however, they just won't be viewed other than in exceptional cases.

Pure text documents, books with creative layout, and web documents essentially are all different visual dialects. In my printed books, depending on the publisher's style, I tend to make extensive use of text boxes, sidebars, and comments in the margins. Use that paradigm of special emphasis in a web document, but don't try to coerce it into notes that work very differently than printed endnotes. Howard C. Berkowitz 17:41, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Started reconstruction

Given the number of new articles on aspects of this theme (see Related Articles) I've begun reconstructing this, moving some elements to those specialist sites. My feeling is that given the specialist articles that have been developed, what is needed here is a lower level gateway article, with minimal referencing but a lay level overview style. I propose to keep all the specialist material that is here however, moving it to the specialist sites/ (and at least the bibliographies for refererences). This OK with everyone here?Gareth Leng 15:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)