13.8: Reviewing

Examining the role of reviewing in contributing to a Wikipedia article can help you understand the role of reviewing in research-based writing. To make a successful contribution to Wikipedia, authors must review what other contributors have already written about the topic. They don’t want to include information that the community of people interested in and knowledgeable about the topic has determined to be inappropriate, off topic, or unimportant, or to simply repeat information already published. Such contributions will be deleted—usually quickly—because they do not offer anything new to people’s understanding of the topic.

To do this review, successful Wikipedia contributors read texts in and outside of Wikipedia. They look at previous versions of an article on the history page, including the change summaries provided by authors, and read the discussion surrounding an article on the discussion page. To show that they have reviewed other texts published on the topic of the article they are contributing to, Wikipedians also provide citations for material they post. As I indicate above, Wikipedia requires that material posted to articles be verifiable (Bruns 114, “Wikipedia:Verifiability”), so contributors need to demonstrate that they can verify material they post by citing its source. As shown in figure 4, an absence of citations often results in a warning that someone needs to cite a source to support what is written or the text will be removed.

Figure 4. Wikipedia’s warning to provide citations to verify claims from the research article

This process parallels what you can do for research-based writing assignments. Review what other contributors have already published about your topic so you avoid writing something that is inappropriate, off topic, or repetitive. Doing this review in formal course writing is somewhat different than doing it in Wikipedia, though. You need to acknowledge in the texts you write that you have reviewed what others have previously published by doing what is called a literature review. A literature review entails summarizing main points from your sources, identifying their insights and/or limitations, and situating these texts in relation to one another and your writing.

Let’s look at an example. Gill provides a literature review in her essay “The Analogical Effects of Neural Hemispheres in ‘The Purloined Letter’”:

There are approaches to cognitive, and consequently
behavioral, functioning that stem from ideas that
each side of the brain thinks differently. Michael
Grady asserts that a person who thinks with one side
of his brain will differ greatly than a person who
thinks with the opposite side (20–21). According to
Thomas Regelski, the left side is said to think in the
following ways: “linear, sequential, logical, analytical,
verbal, fragmenting, differentiating, convergence
(seeks closure) . . . conventional symbols, facts (objective,
impersonal, confirmable), precision, explicit,
Scientific Empiricism/Logical Positivism/certitude/
surety” (30). Conversely, Regelski establishes that
the right side is responsible for thinking in the subsequent
ways, which seemingly oppose the first set
of thinking methods: “circular, simultaneous, paradoxical,
combinative, holistic, divergence (content
with open-endedness) . . . expressive, vague, implicit
. . . Immanence/Introspectionism/Intuitionism/Intuitive
Cognition/indwelling/insight/intuition” (30).
Sally Springer and Georg Deutsch assert in their
book Left Brain, Right Brain that the human brain is
divided in this model, and an easier way to interpret
this model is “the left hemisphere is something like a
digital computer, the right like an analog computer”

(185), and that depending on which hemisphere the
individual uses most primarily, the individual will
think and therefore act in accord with said attributed
qualities (186). Poe incorporates many of these characteristics
into his characters[’] methods during the
investigation. The Prefect exemplifies the left side
thinking with his systematic and complex approach
to finding the purloined letter, while the Minister
and Dupin utilize both right and left side attributes,
thinking about the cognitions of the other and acting
accordingly. (12–13)

Here Gill shows that she has reviewed the work of Grady, Regelski, and Springer and Deutsch by over-viewing their claims about brain function and then connecting those claims to her argument about “The Purloined Letter.” Like a successful Wikipedia contributor, she also offers citations, though the form of these citations is different than in Wikipedia. Wikipedia generally uses hyperlinked endnotes, while the most popular academic citation styles from the American Psychological Association (APA) and Modern Language Association (MLA), which Gill uses here, require in-text parenthetical citations and reference and works cited lists, respectively. Despite these differences, the larger idea is the same: in your research-based writing you need to show you have reviewed other relevant texts to demonstrate conversance with appropriate source material and to allow readers to verify your conclusions.

I end this section suggesting a way you can use Wikipedia to help you with this reviewing process. My intention here is to not to prepare you to contribute to a Wikipedia article itself, but rather to use Wikipedia to prepare you to do the reviewing that is part of successful research-based writing. When you are beginning a research-based writing assignment, read the discussion page for the Wikipedia article on the topic you are writing about and identify the debates, questions, and absences that you find. In other words, list what contributors (1) argue about (i.e., what ideas are contentious), (2) have questions about, and (3) think is missing from and should be included in coverage of
that topic. Then identify these debates, questions, and absences for the published literature (i.e., books, articles) on your topic. Review what other authors have written about them. Looking at the discussion page first allows you to enact on a smaller scale what you need to do with a wider range of sources for a literature review in a research-based writing project.

Let’s consider an example. If you read the discussion page for the Wikipedia article History of the board game Monopoly, a section of which is shown in figure 5, you will find that contributors argue about when the game originated and the role Elizabeth Magie played in its creation; they ask questions about the rules for players selling property to one another; and they think information on the volume of game sales, McDonald’s Monopoly games/promotions, and the World Monopoly Championships is missing and should be addressed more fully. Were you to write about the history of the board game Monopoly, you now have several avenues (no pun intended!) to read about and know what you might need to review in making an argument on the topic.

Figure 5. Section of the discussion page from Wikipedia’s History of the board game Monopoly article