User:Gjd001aquinas/Cultivation theory/Stevenfigge Peer Review

General info
Gjd001aquinas
 * Whose work are you reviewing?


 * Link to draft you're reviewing
 * User:Gjd001aquinas/Cultivation theory
 * Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)
 * Cultivation theory:

Lead
While I think Greg did a great job writing his own lead for the article, I do think that the pre-existing lead on the Wikipedia article is fine as is. One area where I think it could be improved is that it seems like there would be a natural split from the lead into a section titled "Origins" or "Founding" or something along those lines. Most articles that I've seen on theories like this describe the theory and its fundamental concepts in the lead, then when talking about the people who invented it, they use a separate header. The current Cultivation Theory article lacks this.

As a small note, citations on Wikipedia are formatted differently than in an essay, so when you type (Griffin) what it should look like is that superscript. To do this, the Cite button and use whatever number the source in your References is, which seems to be 4 in your sandbox. This will make your article look much more like the average Wikipedia article.

Content
The content included in Greg's contributions seems well sourced, diverse, and valuable. I really like how he's made contributions to multiple sections of the article, and when those contributions aren't content related, he's still written down his thoughts for how the article could be reworked. Since much of what's been added thus far is from our textbook, the information is about as contemporary as it can get. I'm mildly concerned about the amount of direct quotations, as Wikipedia writing style all but removes them. They are very rare to see in a Wikipedia article, so seeing more than one in Greg's contributions might be a sign that some paraphrasing/synthesis has to be done to get the essence of those quotes in his own words.

If there's any section from the current article that feels lacking in terms of content, its the criticism one. I wonder if the criticism section from our book could be useful to include more information about theory's shortcomings.

Tone and Balance
The tone is mostly neutral and consistent, but there are a few instances of a break in tone, for example under the Gender and Sexuality section, Greg added a sentence that included the words "our society". Does this mean American society? Does this mean the global society? What if these issues aren't as big for a reader in India or China? Stray away from anything like "I, We, Our".

Make sure that when you refer to people, other theories, or concepts that already have their own Wikipedia articles, you hyperlink those articles by highlighting the text and hitting the button to the left of "Cite". That way if people want to find out more about a particular theory or theorist, they can click the link.

Sources and References
Greg seems to integrate a wide variety of sources and cite them (though as I already elaborated on earlier he needs to fix the formatting of the citations). I love how modern many of his sources are, and the use of our textbook is good. I think he does a good job of paraphrasing the content from his sources into a digestible way.

The main article is actually sourced and cited quite well overall, with a few exceptions. I would go through and try to identify those big blocks of text that have one or zero footnotes, and see if anything can be done about them. For example, the "Sexual Attitudes" header is predicated on a single source. Maybe it shouldn't exist unless another source can be found.

Organization
Like Greg noted in his sandbox, the organization of the main article is a complete mess. It definitely seems random, and there are sections (like Background) that are all the way at the bottom of the article despite clearly needing to be much higher up. I get the impression that multiple people, when making their contributions to the article, just wrote whatever they had to say at the bottom of the current article, leading to the jumbled mess it is now. This is good because it leaves a lot of room for improvement in terms of organization.

I also really like how Greg has organized his sandbox contributions thus far. Rather than trying to add or rewrite whole sections (aside from maybe the Lead section), he's just contributing well sourced pieces of information here and there, and brainstorming how he can contribute to multiple headers on the article.

Images and Media
The two images that are currently included in the article serve a good purpose, and seem like good diagrams. However, the rest of the article is a complete block of text and includes no media. Greg has yet to include any media in his contributions, so it could be a good opportunity to incorporate images or videos that the main article lacks.

Overall Impressions
I think Greg is off to a good start with his contributions, and the article he's working on seems fairly robust content wise, but has room for modernization and re-organization. The sections and headers on the article for cultivation theory seem organized at random, and I think that if Greg contributes his own information based on modern sources, cleans up the organization of the page, and gives it more direction, it could be transformed into a good article. Peer review review!

Thank you so much Steven for your in depth review of my article. I found you review super helpful and you have many critiques of the article that I did not consider before.

starting with the lead section, I like your idea of splitting the lead section off into another heading about "Founding" or "origin". I agree that it would help the original article. To address your note about the quotation I used. Correct! I will still clear of that so I'm not a plagiarizer.

I will have to edit my citations that is appropriate to Wikipedia format. At the time I was writing this in my sandbox, I was using those as more of a reminder of what sources I wanted to implement into the original article.

On the topic of Criticism, YES! I totally agree. I think the critique of a theory is just as important as the theory itself. I wanted to use the critiques we had from the textbook, there was some good information on other scholars who had their issues with the theory.

I'm glad you pointed out my use of the words "our society." Good call. I may not have noticed that if you had not mentioned it.

I will also look into the "sexual attitudes" heading. I do have one credible source I found that combines cultivation theory and sexual attitudes. and I think I would like to expand this section or move to a broader heading because it seems like a relevant area of research to me. I'm open to being wrong though.

The organization is a mess. I think criticism should go at the bottom. "background" probably does need to be at the top, maybe neighboring the lead section or a newly created "origin" section.

Steven, I really appreciate your peer review. You have given me a lot of suggestions that I will apply to the article.