User:Zy87/sandbox

Final Group Report for the Pizza Page

Team Members: Zheng Yao, Deanna Hall , Adam Schlussel and Abraham Meller

Contribution to the Pizza Article

Editing

The current “Pizza” article is vastly different than it was prior to our project. The majority of our edits concerned the structure of the article and articles on related topics. Below we explain in detail our changes.

• We substantially expanded the Health Issues section by providing data to substantiate claims of high salt content as well as citing the specific ingredient that health advantages are attributed to. We gathered the data from journal articles found on google scholar and Cornell’s library website.
• We also added links to other Wikipedia articles throughout the Pizza article.
• We merged, updated, and improved the wording of the content from History of Pizza, List of pizza varieties by country, and Pizza in the United States into Pizza, as well as moved content that belonged in those articles away from the Pizza article.
• We reformatted the varieties section to include sub sections. It now is more readable and appears nicer in the page.
• We summarized the content in the “Italy” subsection under the variety section since it was overwhelming the larger section and was out-of-place. We then took the more detailed information and moved it to a Italy section, that we created, in the list of pizza varieties by country page.
• We added a new subsection (“United States”) under the variety section, because we have agreed that as the country that shares a large market of pizza nowadays, the United States deserve a spot here. We merged the content from Pizza in the United States into Pizza and cited additional source from reliable books and reports.
• We moved content that was in the "Additional Varieties" section and placed it on the Pizza in the United States page since that was where it should have been all along.
• We edited other miscellaneous issues throughout the article, such as fixing typos and citing reliable sources. For more details, please refer to the individual division section.

Rating Status

We think the state of this article should be sufficient to meet a B-class designation. As mentioned in the standard, one of the major flaws of C class articles is that it will need “substantial cleanup work”. For example, there could be unnecessary and unsourced content. We managed to create subsections and deleted irrelevant information. After editing on both the structure and the details of the article, we believe that it has been clearer than previous versions. Also, we have fixed various citations issues as mentioned earlier, so this could be a big step towards “satisfying a serious student or researcher.”

In fact, the “Pizza”article had been considered sometime in the past for promotion to B-Class status and was accepted for all criteria except “Referencing and citation”, which we believe we improved. The article was not tested for “Coverage and accuracy”, which we are less confident about. This criterion seems very subjective. We conversed amongst ourselves and with other editors concerning the appropriate scope of the “pizza” article versus other, related articles (history of pizza, pizza in the US, varieties of pizza, etc.), and still are not certain how to optimally develop the group of articles in the future. Judges could conceivably decide this article either is not comprehensive enough, or covers too many topics. Besides, we also looked into articles with similar topics as well and found out that “pasta” has been rated as B-class. We figured that our organization of the pizza article shares similarities with it.

Evolution

A major part that we take into consideration is the structure of the whole article. Although the original “Pizza” article contains substantial information, it is extremely disorganized and its outline was not intuitive, and would become increasingly disorganized if editors continued to conform to the existing structure. For example, the original article contained a messy “Varieties” section, with an even more confusing wording of its subsections - “Italy”, “Around the world”, and “Additional varieties”. These subsections were each disorganized in themselves and lacked any semblance of parallel structuring between them. The “Italy” subsection concerned a jumbled collection of topics, including the very detailed cooking instructions (three paragraphs) for neapolitan pizza defined as “definitive” by some italian pizza interest group, a few isolated sentences for other Italian varieties, and a section concerning some sort of Italian legislation.

Therefore, a major organizational edit that we performed was to reorder the existing subsections and create new subsections. The new “Variety” section contains subsections for “Italy” and “United States”, the two most significant countries in the history of pizza, and each of those subsections contains a short history and a list of examples. Italy and the United States are the two most significant countries in pizza history. We anticipate others will add addition subsections in the future. Moreover, we added the “etymology” section. The original article included comments on etymology in the “history” section. The new designated etymology section allowed for a more intuitive presentation of the various theories.

We also considered how information might evolve on related articles (namely History of Pizza, Pizza in the United States, and List of pizza varieties by country) to avoid future redundancies. We decided a separate “United States” subsection was appropriate under the “Variety” section and included a link to the main article. We abandoned our proposed “Americanization of Pizza” section in this article, after deciding that the topic fit better in the other article (i.e. Pizza in the United States). In that way, the structure of the original Pizza article is well reserved while the other one remains intact. With all these links to other Wikipedia pages, the “Pizza” article serves as a one-stop shop for pizza information. Now, Wikipedians can access further information about specific content that sparks their interest. This is inline with our primary goal of making this article as user friendly as possible.

Familiarizing Ourselves with Wikipedia

Technically, we learned to take advantage of sandbox and preview function. Despite the detailed in-class discussion, the editing process still seems a bit abstract and confusing. It is the preview function that helps us visualize the “code” that we wrote and therefore familiarize us with the formatting process. After all those kinds of practicing, we began to feel pretty comfortable with our understanding of syntax and convention. We expected to be censored by other editors if we stepped too far out of line, but did not confront much strong opposition.

We learned to distinguish and use reliable sources in Wikipedia. After the teaching staff pointed out that “pizzafacts.net ” should not be considered as a good source for Wikipedia, we realized the importance of citing reliable sources and turned to Cornell Library and Google Scholar for help. Later, during the process of fixing various citation problems, we get a better understanding of how sources should be appropriately cited.

We learned to link single Wikipedia articles with other related pieces. Initially, when we proposed the changes that we plan to make, we looked only at the “Pizza” article and reflect on itself. Inspired by other Wikipedians who warmly provided suggestions, we soon realized that we can link the Pizza article with History of Pizza, List of pizza varieties by country, etc. When trying to further bump article to B-class, we also looked at articles of similar topics but with higher class than Pizza (e.g. Pasta). Those articles are of great help in addition to the regular standards presented on Wikipedia. Their structure and organization serves as great example for our work.

We had a hard time balancing the aim to “Be Bold” while also considering community opinions. At times our “bold” edits would be reverted by other editors. For instance, when one of our group members tries to merge a large amount of information from History of Pizza to the Pizza article, it was reverted immediately. We did not necessarily learn any new approach such conflicts, except to converse and negotiate with other editors.

Wikipedia Community Experience

We found the Wikipedia community to be surprisingly engaging. When we first started the project, our main concern was the lack of engagement from the community because we thought nobody would be so invested into a seemingly mundane topic such as pizza. We posted on all prior talk-page contributors’ talk pages and in the Tea House (thanks to the reading!) We were definitely wrong from this perspective. We quickly got responses from both previous contributors and Tea House. Additionally, we discovered that by chance the Wikipedia article for improvement was Pizza and suddenly many editors began making changes on the page.

Two experienced individual Wikipedians voluntarily contributed to Pizza, most notably, MindMatrix and Lucas, which both had contributed to the Talk Page in the past and responded to our contacts. MindMatrix wrote a detailed list of suggestions for us, which served as our basis for improving the Pizza page. Unfortunately, Lucas did not add any helpful comments.

Later, we received notifications from editors from TAFI asking us for details on our course assignment and wondering how they can help us without taking over our page. We responded and they became a major resource for us. NorthAmerica1000, NickPenguin and Margin1522 were especially helpful. All of them were engaged with the page throughout the project by giving us advice, responding to our questions. These editors in particular really made Wikipedia feel like a community to us. Unlike us, they had no obligation to the Pizza page and were helpful throughout the assignment.

However, we found community members could be both helpful and combative. User ɱ, on the other hand, seemed to be one of the Wikipedians who was not as accepting to new editors. He removed our edits for a subjective reason and was not compromising on his belief. We were extremely thankful that NickPenguin was around to engage with ɱ because ɱ respected NickPenguin’s comments more than ours. We reached out to discuss his rationale and brought him together with those who suggested the edits to determine the correct form of action. In the end, we came up with a solution that we ended up implementing. This interaction, nevertheless, motivated us to research the Wikipedia rules and guidelines further and see who was correct. We learned more about the synthesis, merging, and split guidelines from this interaction. We also found out about the original research, ownership of ideas, and primary source guidelines from other Wikipedians who were contributing to the talk page as well.

Overall, we felt that the Wikipedia community proved accepting and were patient in dealing with our team of editors. Editors on Wikipedia can definitely be regarded as a community (as opposed to a crowd), since people there interact with each other “in the same place” and share the common purpose of improving the online space as a whole. Even with the welcoming attitude, it feels like we are only touching the fringe of the community, as there are so much rules and culture surrounding Wikipedians. We have much to learn. However, as mentioned above, the large size of the community and necessary expertise sometimes prevents a sense of fellowship from developing.

Breakdown of Group Members' Work

Overall, we worked very well together. We accomplished the majority of our work collectively during weekly meetings, and assigned some tasks to be completed individually when necessary.

Abraham Meller

1. I researched and added information regarding health issues, and responded to multiple editors on the talk page concerning the topic.
2. Researched “Americanization of Pizza” and suggested a new section, but we felt it was potentially redundant with information in the “History of Pizza” article, and maybe too assertive of our American perspective.
3. Replaced the main image in the article to one from Wikicommons that better exemplified a “typical” pizza, as suggested by an editor in the talk page.
4. Altered information in the “etymology” and “history” sections to avoid redundancy and ambiguity, at the suggestion of a community member.

Adam Schlussel

1. I reached out and conversed with many Wikipedians (tea house, previous posters, etc)
2. I restructured and organized the intro, etymology and origins sections (this was reverted) but I took in the other Wikipedians comments and redid my edits differently (which is how they are now).
3. I merged content from History of Pizza, Pizza in US, Pizza and Varieties of Pizza by Country but some were reverted.
4. I linked the current content to existing Wikipedia pages and sourced other content in the varieties, and intro sections.

Zheng Yao

1. Reached out to other Wikipedians, asked for feedback, replied to their feedbacks accordingly.
2. Researched and wrote a new subsection under variety, namly, the United States part.
3. Fixed the the history section according to feedbacks from other Wikipedians.
4. Fixed the citation in etymology part.
5. Organized, edited the major part of final report; responsible for formatting and submission.

Deanna Hall

1. Researched and added to the health issues section and communicated with other Wikipedians on talk page on this topic.
2. Updated citations throughout the “similar dishes” section and linked “Pizza rolls”
3. Made uniform the formatting in “toppings” section
4. Made overall spelling and grammar edits throughout the article