Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Cornell University/Online Communities (Fall 2013)/Peter Pan

COMM/INFO 3460 Wikipedia Project Submission Report By Brittany Berliner, Hannah Kremer, and Xiao Xu

Three students from Cornell's Online Communities class participate in Wikipedia editing project

The official WikiProject article quality grading scheme defines a C-Class article as satisfactory but lacking valuable information. A C-Class article is likely to contain unnecessary content and is in need of a considerable amount of refinement. On the other hand, a B-class article is generally complete. Additional edits are invited; however, there are no major issues with the article. After working countless hours researching pertinent information and actively editing Wikipedia’s Peter Pan article, our group is confident there are no major or even minor problems with the article.

Our substantial edits on the Peter Pan C-Class article are primarily organizational and content revisions. Before editing, the article lacked structure and was in desperate need of some cleaning up. Subject headings didn’t align with featured content and information was scattered as opposed to clear and concise. For example, significant information placed in the popular culture section was unrelated to popular culture. Thus, we placed content irrelevant to popular culture in appropriate sections. Refining the popular culture section resulted in the creation of an additional subject “artistic references”. The popular culture section’s purpose is to list appearances and mentions of the Peter Pan character in media over the last fifty years. We believed the extensive mentions of artistic work dedicated to the character deserved its own subject and so we added a section centered around information on artistic works related to the character.

Edits

Subsections

Another major organizational edit was our implementation of subsections. We believed each section significantly lacked organization. Readers want to be seamlessly directed towards the information they are looking for and subsections do precisely that. Therefore, we provided subsections where we felt it was appropriate. For example, the entire relationship section now has subjections such as “Family”, “Friends”, and “Enemies”. Within these subsections are detailed descriptions of relationships Peter has experienced with other characters. Using credible outside sources including literary analysis papers, journals, and periodicals from the Cornell library, we elaborated on all relationships featured in this section. Specific sources included the scholarly articles “Forever At Play In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan”, “Writing as Auto-Visualization: Notes on a Scenario and Film of Peter Pan and “Never-Never Land” by media analyst Simon Watney.

Citations

A good amount of content in the article was not cited. Concerned by this fault, we went back and provided citations for all content that previously lacked references. Additionally, we linked certain content to Wikipedia articles that were relevant. As a result, viewers can now access further information about specific content that sparks their interest. Ultimately, our number one goal is to make this article as user friendly as possible. Hence, we added several properly cited images to provide visual support.

Editing conflicts

Because we are meticulous editors, we often found ourselves editing our own edits. In fact, there were many edits we saved but didn’t submit until we were confident they were constructive edits. To guarantee our edits were beneficial, we checked in with previous contributors to get our edits approved. As a result, we are certain our contributions are valuable and much needed. Since the article no longer contains unnecessary content and has been considerably refined, we are certain it will someday, in the near future, move up to become a B-class article.

Organization

Our main goal was to create one comprehensible location for all information pertaining to Peter Pan, the character. Prior to our revisions on the page, the article was disorganized and incomplete.

Images

In each section, we updated images from sources including movie screenshots and historic sites, to expand upon general character information. The current version of the Peter Pan page is much more concise and easy to navigate, compared to the excess of unnecessary information beforehand. It is far less tiresome, which gives a better understanding of the true purpose of the character and his relationships. Since some information seemed to dwindle off after the year 2011, we were sure to incorporate the most up-to-date information on the character, Peter Pan.

Subsections

The most significant addition to the page was the separation of relationships into subsections, into “Family,” “Friends,” and “Enemies.” In each of these subsections, we included a fairly detailed description of Peter Pan’s relationship to the character listed, and included a source link to each character’s page for further information.

In addition, we changed the “History” section to “Origin” because we felt that it was more representative of the material in that section and we rephrased the “Appearance” section to now be titled “Interpretations of physical appearance,” since we found the previous title to be deceiving the purpose of the section. Moreover, our combination of the “Major stories,” and “By Barrie,” sections into subsections of “Publications,” with both “Early adaptations” and “Recent adaptations,” gives more approachability to each element. In addition, we modified the “Pop culture” section to “In popular culture,” which now details any appearances that Peter Pan has had in a wide range of works, from parodies to theatre productions. Finally, we categorized the multiple statues of Peter Pan into an “Artistic references” section, including photographs, so that readers can grasp the influential impact that the character has had on countless individuals.

Formatting

Regarding organization, we restructured each section and maintained consistent format by featuring bullet points when appropriate. Furthermore, we were meticulous in using the proper form of English, since a fellow user suggested that we write in British English. Thanks to such extensive correspondence with users on the talk page, we were able to understand what changes would be necessary and to confirm that we were making constructive modifications to the page. Much of what we found contributed to the evolution of the article was the verification and support from others on the page. We were able to utilize their criticisms, in addition to our own, to brainstorm and improve upon our work.

Wikipedia community

One thing that surprised all of us is how engaging the Wikipedia community is. When we first started the project, our main concern was the lack of engagement from the community because we thought no one would be so invested into a fringe topic such as Peter Pan. Soon, we were proven wrong. Just a day after we posted our initial proposal, we received two responses on our talk page. The first one was from NeilN, who thanked us for our contribution but did not make any further comments. Though we would have liked more than the pat on the back, the encouragement was nevertheless exciting for all of us because we had expected no response at all. Our very first Wikipedia response. A great start.

Stelmaris

Our second response on the Peter Pan talk page was the one that truly sparked our involvement. It was from a long-time Wikipedia user, Stelmaris, who had previously edited the Peter Pan article multiple times. After assessing the long list of suggestions Stelmaris provided, we got right to work. We quickly gathered around the laptop and read out his suggestions one by one, eager to learn what this veteran Wikipedia had to offer. Stelmaris first pointed out that many of our proposed changes did not comply with the Wikipedia standards and were redundant. For example, he pointed out that including fully detailed descriptions of different adaptations of Peter Pan was unnecessary, because they're covered by their own pages. We originally wanted to add a list of songs relevant to Peter Pan because we thought the songs and other media richly portray Peter Pan's character by revealing a very authentic and human side. However, we soon realized that Stelmaris was correct in pointing out its irrelevance because there is another page devoted to Peter Pan media.

We eventually gave up on the idea of listing all the songs, but we still wanted to keep many of our other changes (i.e. reorganize the publications and relationships section). Although many of the characters related to Peter Pan already have their own talk pages (ex. Wendy Darling, Captain Hook), we felt that creating a list of these characters is a relevant summary of Peter's relationships. We replied on our talk page thanking Stelmaris and that we would abandon the song idea, but we also informed him that we still planned to reorganize the relationships section and stated our reasoning. We went through with the plan and were excited when Stelmaris commended us for our productive edits.

Rejections

Neverthless, some of our edits were rejected by the community. We included Disney cartoon pictures of the characters mentioned in the relationship section, because they were a nice addition to the text and gave a preview of how the characters are portrayed in the Disney film. However, Stelmaris reverted the change and informed us that including only Disney pictures were not appropriate because Peter Pan is not just a Disney character. He suggested to us to either exclude any character pictures, or include certain pictures from older editions of publications. This suggestion proved quite valuable! When Stelmaris requested our edits to align with the British English language, we turned to our Wikipedia Ambassador JMathewson for guidance. JMathewson assured us that it was fine using all dialects of English, even though the British English is recommended (but not required) on some British Literature. Since we have little experience with British English, we went with our own dialect.

Overall feeling

Overall, we felt that the Wikipedia community proved accepting and were patient in dealing with our team of editors. Even with the welcoming attitude, it feels like we're only touching the fringe of the community, as there are so much rules and culture surrounding Wikipedians. We have much to learn. We undoubtedly had an incredibly successful group dynamic. The three of us took turns equally contributing to forming the base and structure of the article. Our group met weekly, in-person, to ensure that we could learn and receive feedback from one another about the progress being made. Brittany initially conceived the idea, as she is particularly knowledgeable about Disney films in general. From there, Hannah worked on expanding information and research about Peter Pan’s character in various aspects. Each large contribution made was the product of a collaborative, in-person brainstorming session. Since we were physically next to one another, Xiao’s Wikipedia username is the one that we most often utilized, which worked particularly well since he excelled at the formatting component of Wikipedia. As our group dynamic continued, each of us fell into the role of fact checking and editing after completion of each section. At first, Brittany and Hannah were not as familiar with navigating the user portion of the Wikipedia site. Fortunately, Xiao was especially experienced in this, and he taught them innovative approaches for communicating with other Wikipedia users, such as in chat rooms and online forums. Our group found this to be the most important component of our experience; therefore all three of us prioritized interacting with users. From this, we learned that we too were making credible and worthwhile changes to the Wikipedia community.