User:Abdavis329/sandbox

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This is an attempt to make a link to Michel_Foucault also an author

COMM 3460: Wikipedia Project Group Report

1. Your contribution to the article

Our main goals for this project were to edit the writing of the article to make it clearer and more understandable, restructure the article to simplify navigation and maintenance, expand upon existing topics, introduce new information and become valuable members of the Wikipedia community. We found that Wikipedia’s Ray Charles article initially lacked a coherent framework and clear directory, which were present in many other notable artists’ Wikipedia bios. We also added citations where they were missing to enhance the credibility of Wikipedia’s article. Sections that were expanded upon in terms of breadth, depth and clarity include: “Early years,” “Life in Florida, Los Angeles, Seattle and first hits,” “Signing with Atlantic Records,” “Crossover success,” “Substance abuse and legal issues,” “Awards and Honors,” “Contributions to Civil Rights Movement,” “The Ray Charles Foundation,” and “Discography.”

We got a lot of our information from extensive biographies written about Ray Charles, which we found in the Lincoln Hall Music Library. Specifically, we heavily utilized Brother Ray by Ray Charles and David Ritz, Ray Charles: Man and Music by Michael Lydon and Ray Charles: Singer and Musician by Norman Winski. We also found several useful sources from news articles covering Charles’ death from NPR and The New York Times.

Ultimately, we do believe that the Ray Charles article is good enough to be promoted to a B class. Where before we edited the article, it did indeed follow the readers' experience for a C-class article according to Wikipedia (the article “would not provide a complete picture for even a moderately detailed study”) we firmly believe this has changed. By restructuring the article to model featured articles, and adding substantial information about his life, career, and legacy, we believe that the description for a B-Class article’s readers' experience; that “Readers are not left wanting, although the content may not be complete enough to satisfy a serious student or researcher,” more accurately describes the article. Though it is not perfect, and may fall short of the entire description of Charles’ life, it is now comprehensive enough to be a B-class article.

2. Evolution of the article

As mentioned above, when the article was first introduced to us at the beginning of the semester, we were all quite shocked at how little information the Ray Charles wikipedia page had. As one of the most influential artists of the past century, we figured the article would be flawless; but instead, we found ourselves browsing through an article lacking proper citation, riddled with grammatical errors, and without a proper “flow” that we found other articles of artists with similar influence had. There were many contributions to the way the article evolved over time, but we found that relating to other artists such as Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix helped us determine what kind of pace and structure our article could have in order to keep total length concise while including all important and relevant information. Other major contributions toward our articles development came from the interactive feedback we received from wikipedia users and editors, particularly those who heckled us about proper citation and information relevance. We were able to directly relate some of these comments on our site talk page to in-class discussion, particularly regarding lectures focusing on “language” of online communities as well as member involvement. Users such as SovalVartos commented frequently on our changes, and left messages claiming certain updates needed further improvement before publication. However, as new members of the Wikipedia community, we found ourselves exchanging messages asking for further clarification and guidance; helping us integrate our information smoothly without multiple transitions. Lastly, we found that communication through class-interaction and peer review helped us decide what parts of our article to feature and reorganize, improving the overall aesthetic appeal of the web page. Our first revision focused on improving citation and content delivery; as the course was just starting and focusing on content clarity and coherence, we spent our time revising specific sentence structure and browsing each line individually to ensure all data requiring proper citation fit the community guidelines. Our second weekly revision involved our first “minor edits” - in which we decided that instead of editing content already on the webpage, we would begin adding minor sentences to pre-existing paragraphs to increase the overall quantity of information. We decided to add a topic toward the “Legacy” section of the article, as most users of Wikipedia likely searched for “Ray Charles” in order to examine the impact he had on today’s culture. By adding a rather large subsection regarding “The Ray Charles Foundation” as well as hint toward the Ray Charles Memorial Library, users were given ample information to help explain the monumental impact Charles had on society, as well as understand the philanthropic and well-natured intent of the artists financial donations. The original site was rather small in comparison, so we each added a few lines in topics we found interesting in order to increase content count. We continued searching for ways to increase the aesthetic appeal of the site, and Skyler particularly found it useful to reorganize the way that quotes were displayed at the bottom of the page. In our third revision, we decided to massively adjust the way that content was delivered (after the inspection of other similar artists) by adding a lot of information about his early life and the progression of his career, and rearranged paragraphs to improve readability and allow the site to scroll as a story would (i.e., beginning at birth, towards death, ending at legacy). By doing this, we found the site incredibly informative yet easily readable, a goal we set towards our group at the beginning of this assignment. Lastly, our ending revisions the week before the final publication included minor edits and adjustments to tweak sentences towards sounding “just right”, and correcting formatting errors caused by our last shift of information.

3. Wikipedia policies and technical aspects

When we first began our Wikipedia project, none of us had any experience editing Wikipedia before. Naturally, it took us time to get used to the standards of practice. Through Ishtiaque’s lectures, observing other users, and our own trial and error, however, we were able to learn the policies, formatting, and markup language of Wikipedia. One thing that we struggled with at first was doing citations. We did not realize, for example, that you could create “named references” and then simple type “.” Learning this by seeing other named references made by other users helped us improve our understanding of how to give credit to sources on Wikipedia. Another thing we learned was the necessity to sign one’s comments. While we knew this was important right from the beginning because we were taught it in class, we forgot to do it a lot in the beginning. It was only after we were actually saw multiple users doing it in conversations with us and we were given feedback by other users that it truly was a norm to sign your posts, that we began to remember to consistently type the four tildes after making posts. Just as the Sukumaran paper found, posting behavior of past users truly affected the way we made our comments. It also took us a while to pick up on how to respond to other users on talk pages. While we learned in class how to use colons to indent new lines, we did not really figure out how to do this until we saw it in practice. Some other things that we learned to improve the project included uploading photos to Wikimedia, linking other Wikipedia articles to the one we edited, physically making headings and subheadings, and figuring out how to structure in article on a musical artist.

There was not that much that kept us from learning the policies and technical aspects other than time constraints. I’m sure if we all worked on this project every hour of every day we would learn some more interesting technological affordances and important policies but naturally there were constraints associated with how long we could feasibly work on the project. Another thing that prevented us from learning policies and technical aspects was the behavior of other users. While those that actually gave us tips and suggestions did help us learn, those who reverted our edits without explanation prevented us from learning how to do better in the future.

Community experience

We were was lucky enough to have frequent and meaningful interactions with multiple members of the Wikipedia community. Our group’s first interaction with a Wikipedia community member was on the lucid dream article with Dr. K, a long-time user who had edited many pages. After introducing ourselves on the lucid dream talk page, Dr. K immediately gave us intense feedback about minute details. In hindsight, this advice was most likely intended to be constructive but it was overwhelming and intimidating. We were so nervous to continue editing while such a strong presence watched our activity, so we switched topics to Ray Charles. Ironically, this interaction happened as we were learning about the effects of feedback on new members in an online community. While Cheng et al. discovered authors of negatively-evaluated content tend to contribute more, this concept did not apply to our experience. In fact, we completely stopped contributing to the lucid dream article in order to find another sub-community to join. In his study, Cheng also states authors of negatively-evaluated content will continue to have post of lower quality and we would like to believe our posts improved after receiving Dr. K’s criticisms. Our interactions in this area of Wikipedia didn’t make us feel like we were part of a community or a crowd, rather a one-on-one spat with a superior. Our experiences with users on the Ray Charles article was significantly more pleasant and encouraging than our conversations with Dr. K. Soon after submitting our proposal on the talk page, were all greeted by a user named Rothorope who left a welcome message on two of our talk pages, sent us links to introductory materials and gave us general advice. Rothorpe continued to be a common presence during our editing of the Wikipedia article, making minor edits and changes to any content we added. We had another strong positive experience after reaching out to MadScientistX11, who suggested we approach the Teahouse for further advice. Nathan2055 invited us to join the Teahouse and learn from more experienced editors, however, our questions did not receive any response. Since there was no feedback in the Teahouse community, we stopped participating in this area. As discussed by Lampe & Johnston in “Follow the (Slash) dot,” this situation is common among new members of online communities. According to the researchers, “new users who received no moderation were less likely to make a second comment.”

Not all of our interactions with users on the Ray Charles article were pleasant. Some were rather difficult and uncomfortable to address. There were a few instances in which users, like SovalValtos and Donner60, deleted large chunks of our edits — equivalent to thousands of bytes — without any prior warning. SovalValtos targeted the entire class’ Wikipedia activity and unfairly treated students as less valuable community members. Donner60 was more respectful and posted on Alexa’s talk page after revising one of her edits, explaining his actions and concerns. After communicating with Donner60 and informing him of his mistake, he continued to engage us in conversation and offered further advice on different ways to monitor our edits and the progress of the article. These experiences occurred after we had already been editing the page for a few weeks, so we were equipped to begin a conversation and defend our actions. It ultimately benefitted our Wikipedia experience because we learned how to settle disagreements in an online space and made us feel a greater sense of pride over our contributions.

After we began editing the Ray Charles article, the activity on the page surged. Edits were previously once or twice a month, but this escalated to every other day once we joined the article. Although many of the members editing with us were returning users who had edited the page before, we did not feel as if we were joining a community. The users did not communicate in groups and it seemed as if they were extremely independent of each other. Any conversations held with other users was on a one-on-one basis, not group chat. A simultaneous conversation engaging multiple people who offer their opinion on a single, specific issue should be a natural occurrence in a community. Our experience made Wikipedia seem like more of a "wise crowd," in which members would volunteer their expertise or thoughts when they individually deemed it necessary.

4. Individual contributions

Skyler Dale

• Skyler was responsible for the restructuring effort, revising and adding to the sections about Ray Charles’ early life, and for making grammatical errors throughout the entire article. In particular, Skyler restructured the headings to include dates and make the article more like featured articles about artists. He also added extra information. For example, he added information about who Charles was raised by, how he learned to play piano, whom he influenced, and what his school experiences were like. Finally Skyler reached out several Wikipedia users including MadscientistX11 from Teahouse, who answered him and provided feedback, as well as other users who unfortunately didn’t reply, such as TG0500 and Man010sallow. Skyler also had conversations about how to improve the article’s content and structure with Rothorpe and Cassianto. Finally, he investigated how to create and subsequently created named references and citations within Wikipedia, and figured out how to sign comments and appropriately respond to other Wikipedians.

Alexa Davis

• Alexa was responsible for restructuring, cleaning up, expanding and enhancing the credibility of Ray Charles’ career details; reorganizing the legacy section to include subsections; expanding the drug and substance abuse section; adding a fuller discography; including a new image to discography; and fixing missing citations. She found information about Ray Charles online and in various books from Cornell’s Lincoln Hall Library. Within the career section, the most vital and needed changes were needed for Ray Charles’ early career traveling around the country. For example, she provided accurate details regarding why Charles left secondary school and his climb to success through music unions and jazz clubs. She removed incorrect information from other users, edited writing for clarity and added paragraphs of her own content using secondary sources. In addition to creating subsections in the legacy section, she combined a previous section entitled “Georgia” into a new “Civil Rights Movement” subsection to enhance the reader experience and mirror the layout of other biographies. She monitored edits made by users, such as Rothorpe and Donnor60, and collaborated with other community members to achieve a common goal.

Frank Romano

• Frank helped determine initial restructuring and reformatting conditions, examining other Wikipedia pages and determining proper course of action from such points. Frank felt the article was too short when originally presented to the group, and decided to add information to the “Legacy” section of the Ray Charles Wikipedia Bio; as he felt that the Legacy of Ray Charles would have the greatest impact on readers searching for the artists page. He researched the impact Charles had on the community, and decided to add a topic describing “The Ray Charles Foundation” as well as “The Ray Charles Memorial Library” - depicting the philosophical views of Ray Charles to the Wikipedia community. With Interactions through users such as Rothorpe and SovalVartos, Frank recognized styling errors and citation errors in his additional content addition, and adjusted accordingly. This information and critique received from fellow Wikipedians helped Frank recognize other errors scattered throughout the page, and correct such minor imperfections to make the page more readable and resourceful. With an extensive computational background as an Information Science student, Frank was genuinely surprised with the resourcefulness of the community and ease of the Wikipedia content editor; with most computing interfaces being tricky and non-user-friendly, Frank found it refreshing to see Wikipedia’s ability to allow non-computer savvy users to edit the online world.