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Article: Fox Group Report

We noticed that we were dealing with a skeleton of an article with very limited sections and sparse information. The Conservation section, for example, had no conservation efforts of the foxes that needed them (the endangered foxes like the Island fox and Darwin's fox). The General Characteristics section had information that one would gather by simply looking at the animal. We decided that major changes needed to be done to beef it up. The contributions listed in the sections succeeding were effective in expanding the article and were conducive to our goal of making it a more reliable encyclopedic source.

The fox article was edited by:

Nicolas Vera

Omer Syed

Jeffrey Tuarez

Sarah Kurahashi-Sofue

Contribution

A lot of necessary information was missing in the original fox article. The General Characteristics section, for example, only included the possible coat colors, minimal information on their diet and feeding, and their average lifespan; there was also false information on the average weight of the fox. The Conservation section explained the fox's spread throughout the world and into urban areas; they only briefly mentioned that some foxes are considered endangered in their environments. The Etymology and the Classification sections were the most complete and only needed minor editing, which included adding missing citations and making the layout more pleasing and easier to navigate for the general user.

The Fox talk page was pretty barren except for a trending topic of adding an urban foxes section. Our first task, therefore, was to add the Urban Fox section, which would include how foxes behave in urban settings as well as their direct impact on humans. Additionally, we aimed to fix the major sections of the fox article including the Conservation section, the General Characteristic section, and the Relationship with Humans section (where Urban Foxes) would be added. Later, it was decided to fully expand the Urban Foxes section in the Red fox article and add a short summary of urban foxes in the fox article itself. We would also make small edits throughout the article to make it the best quality possible; edits include: grammar mistakes, missing citations, and cohesiveness of the article. Text and photos were added and the article's sections were rearranged and organized accordingly. Later in the project, we compared our article to the bear article as the bear article is a B-Class. “Bear”, like “fox”, is an umbrella term that consists of many genera; this is compared to animals like Coyote or Gray Wolves which are on the species level. We wanted to see how a broad topic like bears were laid out on Wikipedia and what information they were able to include. Unlike bears though, foxes are not a monophyletic clade, so we had to be careful not to mention features that foxes shared with other canines that were not considered to be a “fox.”

Finding sources was a challenging aspect of this project because the information available about foxes are mostly information on a few species: the arctic fox and the red fox. When we searched for such sources, most were articles and books on red foxes and the various subspecies. Even in Mann Library, the few books on foxes focused on red foxes. One book, however, was able to give us most of the biology of foxes in general, though it was titled The red fox. Here, a Wikipedia user believed that we were basing our facts solely on the red fox. Other sources included various journals and scholarly articles found in databases like JSTOR. The sections on fox conservation proved to be the easiest because we were able to find plenty of information using the databases and IUCN red list for the conservation efforts of the two species of interest; this section was more specific. We believe that we are still missing valuable and necessary information on foxes that will prevent it from moving to a B-Class article. Nevertheless, substantial work was made towards the improvement in quality of the article, especially when compared to its state at the start of the project.

Evolution

The introductory paragraphs started with the fox's general characteristic and then only mentioned the variety of fox species, their distribution throughout the world and briefly touched upon foxes in culture. What most readers wouldn't know from this information is that foxes are not a monophyletic group, but rather paraphyletic. Fox genera, therefore, share a common ancestor; what makes them paraphyletic though, is that the group of fox genera is separated by a genus not considered to be a "fox."

The General Characteristic section evolved continuously throughout this process and was the section with the most work done. Sarah Kurahashi-Sofue first kept it as General Characteristics, but as I started to add more behavioral aspects of the fox like hunting techniques and vocalizations, as well as going more in depth on the sexual characteristics, I found that Biology would be more suitable. The subsections weren't formed until more information was found and added to the article. For better organization and easier navigation, I added the Pelage, Dentition, Behavior, Sexual Characteristics, and Vocalization sections. Within Pelage, the only addition that was made were the fact that foxes moult seasonally and their fur color and texture can vary with the seasons and age. In Dentition, the fox's dental formula was added as well as in depth information about their canines and carnassial pair; what makes them a true carnivore. With Behavior, I merged the meager Diet section from elsewhere in the article, as suggested by a fellow student, Zheng Yao ; their cacheing and hunting behavior were explained in here as well. I then added information on their sexual characteristics like the anatomical differences between a vixen and a male fox. I also briefly went into their reproductive cycle. As the Vocalization section only mentioned that their vocal repertoire is vast, I felt the need to add actual sounds they make at different stages of their life cycle and for what reason. Ishtiaque suggested we add sound clips to the matching vocalization, but we were unable to find fox sounds that would be acceptable on Wikipedia.

Another section with a major overhaul was the Conservation section. This section was finished pretty quickly as I summarized the endangered species' conservation status, why they are considered endangered, and efforts done to help the species recover. The information on foxes being opportunistic feeders and their ability to adapt well to urban environments was moved down to the Relationship with humans section.

The Classification section had a minor edit in which the list of the known fox genera was turned into a chart, as suggested by Maggie Wong . The pictures of the species in each genera would then be next to their respective genus. Omer Syed filled in the missing pictures of the Simien fox and the Falkland Islands fox. This chart is still being debated upon as there are heavy amounts of white space.

Foxes In Culture started off with what seemed to be three "fun facts." Because there was a separate article on this very topic, it was challenging to figure out what information should be added there that was not already on the other article. We decided that Jeffrey Tuarez should summarize what foxes represent in different cultures. He then focused on foxes in folklore and the media in the West and Asia.

During the beginning of the project, Nicolas Vera found that most cases of urban fox sitings and studies were based on the red fox. As expected, there was some information on the Red fox article that he decided to expand upon. Information on their range and population size was added, followed by their behavior in urban environments and attempts to control (if possible) their increasing numbers.

Sarah Kurahashi-Sofue : My intrinsic motivation to share my knowledge of animals definitely increased my quantity and quality of contribution, which is contradictory to what Roberts et al. found in their research (intrinsic motivation should not increase one's contribution in any way). We can collectively agree, though, that the extrinsic motivator of a grade and the internalized external motivator of looking great to the professor led to the increased contribution; the self-determination theory indeed played a major part during this project.

Process of Learning about Wikipedia

Since every member of our group had some sort of experience with a markup language such as HTML before coming to this class, picking up on the syntax of Wikipedia was actually not too difficult for us. A lot of the formatting that needed to be done could also be added using the various buttons and drop down menus on the editing page itself. Ishtiaque's tutorials on Wikipedia editing helped tremendously to tailor our HTML knowledge for Wikipedia use.

We were also able to familiarize ourselves with Wikipedia's policies and other etiquette through the same mini editing workshops in class. These workshops served as a basic introduction of what we should be aware of when editing on Wikipedia, such as adding content, adding images, utilizing talk pages, citing our sources, and introducing us to norms and standard procedures that we otherwise would not have been aware of had we jumped straight into this project on our own. Afterwards, we would go onto the Wikipedia reference tools just to refresh the material we learned from the workshops, and to ensure that we were strictly adhering to Wikipedia policies before posting anything. It also helped a lot that we had some feedback from veteran Wikipedians on how to better cite sources, what to watch for, etc. User: Anaxial, for example, suggested Sarah's use of the same citation multiple times be changed so that it would not appear on the ref list many times; we should instead use the "ref name" option. During class as well, we were constantly reminded by others' interaction with Wikipedians and how we should always be positive in our own interactions with other Wikipedians. If we put out negativity, it would come back to us.

Learning the norms of Wikipedia actually came from interacting from other Wikipedians. Although the activity on the fox talk page was relatively light in recent months, just by observing how the talk page was structured and reading the other comments there highlighted certain standards, such as signing our names and organizing how we would make our edits. Additionally, we were introduced to a concept of projects when on the talk page of Fox, and saw that fox lay within the domain of WikiProject: Dogs. The idea of inter-relatedness between articles and supposed collaboration between editors of multiple articles from that project was previously unknown to us; knowing this prompted us to attempt to leverage additional help from editors of other pages.

One major hurdle in better learning the policies and technical aspects of Wikipedia was the fact that there was so much written about their policies and guidelines; and rightly so to regulate the behaviors of many. To go into this community without making any errors is near impossible as not only would one have to read their guides completely, but one would also have to remember every detail. For the most part though, Wikipedians have one centralized goal and it is to help spread knowledge. In accordance with the Collective Effort model, each Wikipedian contributes something unique to the community, the uniqueness of the contribution increasing future contribution by themselves and others.

An issue Sarah ran into was during the article editing itself. I first edited directly onto Wikipedia, working in small increments. But I quickly found that a Wikipedia Etiquette is to not make too many edits in a short period of time. I therefore began editing on an external program (Word) where I would then copy and paste the new information over the old. During this time, though, I had unintentionally reverted a few users' small edits. They seemed to not mind and went through my edit to make their own edit once more. There also seemed to be an understanding that edits can happen at the same time and as long as one was not constantly reverting another's edit out of malice and/or without reason, accidents were okay.

Overall, while contributing to the Fox article was a great learning experience for us all, we feel that such an experience could definitely been enhanced had there been more activity from other editors on the talk page. Coming into this project, we were all newbies with regards to editing on Wikipedia, and we felt that any help or advice from an expert editor with more experience would have been invaluable to our learning experience.

Community

As mentioned before, a lot of our learning experience came from actually contributing from to the article and receiving feedback from other Wikipedians who interacted with us through a variety of means, ranging from posting on the article pages, talk pages, and also on the talk pages of other similar pages from the same WikiProject. In our case, learning did not solely entail acting upon positive beneficial feedback, it was also about learning how to deal with other members who were not the most polite in their interactions.

Our attempts to find a Wikipedian knowledgable on our topic proved to be unsuccessful. Sarah's post on the Wikiproject: Mammals remains unanswered. A similar post on Wikiproject: Dogs resulted in one user suggesting we check out the Mammal project and another user saying that we should look at specific articles and their contributors. The people we looked for were those who seemed knowledgable about canines; they, unfortunately, were knowledgable on the canine Canis familiaris and the associated breeds, rather than wild canids. The other editors were overall dismissive of our efforts, and would shy away from helping us by trying to direct us to other projects, or generally stating that they “don’t know who the fox guru is.”

Communicating with other Wikipedians on our individual talk pages was actually overall beneficial. One example was Nicolas's interaction with Ben Finn. On the actual talk page of the fox page, Ben Finn suggested the general idea of adding a section about urban foxes, which we thought was pretty interesting. When Nicolas contacted him about whether he knew any information about urban foxes, and he responded in the negative. This served a dual purpose: it introduced to us a culture of users sharing ideas, though having little knowledge about the subject themselves, and that gathering information is always a constant. Because of the suggestion of Ben Finn, we decided as a group to add a section about urban foxes. Sarah was able to find a constant editor for the changes we made on the article itself. User: Anaxial had the fox page on their watchlist and offered to help us out through minor editing and formatting suggestions; his help has so far been invaluable!

We also interacted with users on the main talk page of our fox article. Before we joined the talk page and began contributing to the project, we noticed that activity was infrequent, and that the latest activity was not until many months back. However once started adding content, there were a few supportive users willing to help us out. One such user, .0x0077BE, explained the importance of properly citing sources, and even indicating where we were missing citations for us to fix later on.

Also, on our main article talk page, we received feedback from our classmates, who, at that point, we could consider fellow Wikipedians. Some of their suggestions included relying on more than a few good sources instead of just one, and also had some comments on our organization o information, saying that we should have included the diet section within the biology section. We took note of these pieces of advice, added more sources and journals, and also moved the diet section under behavior, which is a subsection of Biology. Again, the overall sentiment from our interactions was positive.

During our brief interactions with other Wikipedians, we found ourselves talking to them very formally, as we would any new person we meet and interact with offline (Yee et al.). As previously stated, we wanted to keep our interactions friendly so that we would receive help rather than negative reactions. We, unfortunately, ended up encountering some negative activity when anonymous and new users felt the need to constantly vandalize our page. One notable example includes: replacing the Conservation section with lyrics of the viral hit, "What does the fox say." While this was frustratingly annoying, the experience highlighted the true nature of what can occur online. We did not have the issues other students had of entering EditWars and having to deal with less than favorable Wikipedians. On the other hand, our page is pretty quiet in terms of other users adding information to expand the article. Being "newbies," we did make errors throughout our time on Wikipedia. We were fortunate enough, however, to have positive and constructive feedback; the positive feedback actually increased our quality of contribution, which is contradictory to what Cheng et al. found during their research. And we were able to easily become a Wikipedia editor as there was a low barrier of simply understanding HTML to enter into the fold (Bryant et al.).

With the lack of extensive help and feedback from other Wikipedians, we felt that we were not part of the greater Wikipedian community nor crowd, but rather our own "Fox community." This community had a goal of making the article as improved as possible. Though the contributions by others were minor, they were enough to catch missing citations, fix grammar and citation errors, and revert such attempts at vandalism.

Task Breakdown

Nicolas Vera :

•Posted our goals on Fox talk page

•Expanded Urban foxes section within the article red fox

•Added Urban foxes sub section and relevant information to the article fox

•Found printed sources on foxes and added to working bibliography on Fox talk page

•Communicated to other Wikipedians

•Contributed to group report

Omer Syed

•Posted few photos of foxes in the Classification section

•Contributed to group report

Jeffrey Tuarez

•Expanded Foxes in culture sub section

•Contributed to group report

Sarah Kurahashi-Sofue

•Expanded on goals on Fox talk page

•Found online articles on foxes through online databases and other similar websites; added to working bibliography on Fox talk page

•Responded to user (Wikipedians and classmate) comments on Fox talk page

•Reworked General Characteristics into the new Biology section, and added relevant information

•Added two endangered species and information in Conservation section

•Charted the fox genera and species in Classification section, added a couple of photos