User:Im257/sandbox

Group Report for the Mike Trout Page

Team Members: Hudson Belinsky and Inez Morales

Contributions to the Mike Trout Article

• One of the main issues we found right away with our Wikipedia article was many Bare Links which we think hindered this article from obtaining a higher class status. We decided early on one of our main priorities will be to find sources to fill in the page as well as finding sources that can add additional information as we see fitting.
• The second main area we looked to create was the Off The Field section of the article. While doing our research to find eliminate the Bare Links problem, we also found many articles describing various references to Trout away from the Baseball Field. We focused our Off The Field section on describing the pop culture references made to Mike Trout, most notably was a moment in 2014 when President Barack Obama compared Trout to the 2014 U.S. Farm Bill. Hudson and I found it beneficial to add to this section for it shows that Trout is very quickly becoming a well known house hold name as his popularity and career continue to grow.
• We chose to add a put more additional information into the "Amateur career" section of the Article as well as adding additions to the "Draft and Minors Section" to add detail on Trout's baseball career.
• Through our research we used many baseball news sites for listing Trout's awards and to describe his skill set on the field.
• While we worked very hard to aid in ridding all the Bare Links of the Mike Trout article, for future editing purposes, it would be great, if possible, to find and add more information on Trout's personal life (Which is a bit lacking on the page currently) before this article can move up from a C-Class to a B-Class article.

Evolution of the Article

After an initial read through of the Mike Trout page, there was already a strong base for us to work with. However, our main concern was a lot of information without citations or references. We noticed that some important information, such as an "Off the Field" section didn't exist and the Mike Trout page served solely to give information on Trout's baseball career. We decided early on we wanted to focus on adding references and a few more personal details to the page. We worked on the "Amateur Career" section to clean it up a bit as well as remove some of the opinion statements, and swapped them for factual information. We also found some sections to be very lacking, for example the Draft And Minors section makes no mention of Grag Morhardt, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim scout who was adamant that the Angels select Trout, we added in the information to display this information including citations. Similarly, we added in information that describes how the New York Yankees sought out Trout the year he was drafted and, displayed, as rumor has it, that the Yankees were planning on selecting Trout as their top pick. We worked to fill in any information we found to be extremely lacking as well as confirming many sources on the Wikipedia page through much research.

Learning Wikipedia

Class lectures that were taught by TA Ishtiaque helped us a great deal to learn about Wikipedia. Hudson and I repeatedly used the sandbox to continue to practice our wiki language to ensure we were always properly editing. One of the best sources we drew off of was the TAs in our class, particularly TA Elizabeth who knows Wikipedia mark-up language thoroughly and often was able to teach us short cuts for the language and how to better use the took bar at the top of the sandbox to make editing easier.

One practice we made sure to continuously use was the "show preview" function of the page. We wanted to ensure that the article or talk page we just edited has no mistakes and that we correctly formatted everything. We also read the Wiki Markup page for specific questions we had. We also had to work extra hard to ensure that all our sources were highly reliable and there was no non-neutral language within the article since Mike Trout is still a living person. For questions we had on editing a page of a living person, we turned to the Wikipedia page Biographies of Living Persons for more information.

During our time editing on Wikipedia there was a few items we struggled with that eventually we came to master:

• Making too many small edits - there were times when we wanted to make many small edits as we'd be reading through, so we had to decide to make one large edit/sweep to rid the page of grammatical/smaller errors that were not necessarily content driven changes.
• We had to ensure that we were keeping track of the changes we were making, which was difficult when two separate people were attempting to edit the page at the same time (you cannot do this, it is an "Edit Conflict"), so instead we decided as a team that Inez would work on finding more sources and very much the research portion of the project, while Hudson would collect the sources and make the changes to the Mike Trout page.
• Another issue we struggled with was replying to the other Wikipedians on their talk pages. We reached out to many individuals who were editing similar pages on Wikipedia to ask for their help with our article, since we do not necessarily receive notifications via email when someone replies to us on their talk page, we continuously had to check back on talk pages to ensure we weren't missing any correspondences, it'd be important to note for future classes to be checking these talk pages daily to ensure no communication goes forgotten.

The Community Experience

One of the most interesting portions of this project, we found as a team was that there are many individuals who are very active on Wikipedia. These Wikipedians will almost immediately respond to a question you pose on their talk page or will be quick to comment on the changes you made to the article. A good portion of this project was focused on becoming immersed in the Wikipedia community and learning the proper norms on how to interact with users and (particularly in taking and offering advice to make an article better).

As the purpose of this project was to immerse ourselves an online community to understand how its users interact, our group appropriately finished the project with a secure understanding of Wikipedia's norms for participation and interactive process of content creation. Although some Wikipedians are great at responding and willing to offer advice, many do not respond. We reached out to various individuals who were editing other baseball players' pages and the only Wikipedian who really reached back out to our group to give us concrete advice was JayJasper who offered sound advice on how to get rid of bare links and gave us the advice to use a system called Prove It which is a script that many avid editors use to find correct citations for many sources in an article.

Although we did not hear back from most of the Wikipedians we reached out to, we're really happy we had the chance to interact with JayJasper whose advice really helped us further develop our article. The community experience, we felt, was also the community of our classmates in Comm 3460 who really helped edit our article, Skylerd23, ket47, and cjm274 also gave us some sound advice on how to enhance our Wikipedia page - in particular adding in more wiki links to other articles within our Mike Trout article and cutting down on the 2012 section which described Trout's career work.

Breakdown of Group Members' Work

Our group was smaller than most of the our classmate's groups, it was only two of us in the group: Hudson Belinsky and Inez Morales. Because there were only two of us, there were some definite strengths and limitations. Since there was only two of us on our team, we had an easier time communicating and were able to very easily breakdown who would be doing what for the duration of this project.

• Hudson was the poster for our wikipedia page and he was the one who reached out and communicated to fellow Wikipedians who were editing similar topics. Hudson's main focus was on compiling the researched materials to add as sources within the page to complete some of the Bare Links and to add in information for specific areas that were lacking. Hudson also worked on adding a new section "Off The Field" to the Mike Trout page.
• Inez was the main researcher for this project. She worked on trying to find sources for existing material in the article that was lacking the correct citations. Her primary role was to research the subjects and to edit the posts made by Hudson to ensure there was consistent proper formatting and the wiki language was properly used.
• Talk Page: Both of us on the team consistently posted to the Talk Page discuss some of the changes. Since Hudson was the poster to the wikipedia article, his name is more generally attached to the Talk Page as adding more changes.

Overall, it was fun to work as a pair for it made meetings and communications easier to establish, however, there were times when e wanted to make more adjustments to our article, but did not have enough people on our team to completely restructure the page as we had initially discussed together.