Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Assessment/A-class review 2009/Aldol reaction

Comments from Physchim62

An article which has only just been on the Main Page, so I hope we're not going to find too much wrong with it! I corrected a couple of minor issues here. It's not really my field, but the article seems to cover the main points of what is a large topic, with appropriate use of summary style.

I was surprised to find so much text in the diagrams: it's not something we usually encourage for a number of reasons. Firstly, it doesn't reproduce well; secondly it means that the diagrams have to be redrawn for each project. I would also like to have seen an illustratary reaction scheme in the final "Biological aldol reactions" section, even if this is relatively unimportant compared to the rest of the subject matter. However, these are minor points which can be addressed in the normal process of article improvement, not anything which would make me say that the article doesn't meet our A-class criteria. Physchim62 (talk) 20:56, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Comments from Walkerma

I just did a complete read of this article, which is in my area of interest. This article still meets our requirements for A-Class. It covers the topic thoroughly, and is well-referenced. The issues of stereoselectivity, regioselectivity and chemoselectivity are all covered extremely well, and important recent developments are also described. I did see a couple of things that I believe are wrong or unclear, but by & large this article is well written and correct. I can see all of the same points that Physchim62 mentions; I think the captions on the drawings, however, are necessary for explaining a complex topic. You can't indicate things like syn vs anti and the various steric interactions without using words, as far as I can see. One concern I have is that we don't have many simple examples of the reaction for sophomore undergraduates (or first year chem BSc students in the UK system); although the mechanism is introduced at this level, most of the discussion that follows is more suitable for an upper level undergraduate course or a postgraduate course. Since it is a standard second semester topic for sophomores in US colleges, I may look into adding something, though I hate to make this article even longer!

One topic covered in depth here, that may not belong here so completely, is the coverage of enolate formation. Enolates are often used for aldol chemistry, and clearly issues of E vs Z or boron vs lithium are critical, but this is one topic that could be spun off into a related article (as was done with the Mukaiyama aldol). I worked on the Wittig reaction article, and we ran into the same problem - should we include the Wittig reagent as part of that article, or as a separate article. In that case the reagent is almost always used in the Wittig reaction, yet we opted to have a separate article on the reagent because conceptually it's distinct. This is something that could be discussed on the talk page.

Overall, though, these are mainly matters of preference and opinion, and I believe that this article represents some of the very best chemistry content on WP. It clearly meets the A-Class criteria, as judged at the start of 2010. Walkerma (talk) 14:10, 1 January 2010 (UTC)