User:Cjm274/sandbox

Group Report for the 1992 United States men's Olympic basketball team page

Team Members: Cjm274, ket47, gk252, and mjm627

Contributions to the 1992 United States men's Olympic basketball team Article

Gavin created the table & legend in the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section. This table compares the 1992 team to other other USA men's Olympic basketball teams. The table compares the medal count, ppg, 2pt %, 3pt%, ft%, rpg, fg of all men's Olympic basketball teams from 1992 to 2012. This information was retrieved from the FIBA archive. Christopher reformatted the "Forming the team" section by adding two subsections about the committee's decision to leave Isiah Thomas off the team, and the committee's decision to choose Laettner over Shaq. The subsection "Selections" was also edited to stress that the US basketball committee included Laettner on the team as a concession to previous all collegiate system. Christopher also added more detail about Barkley elbowing the Angolan player in the U.S.'s first Olympic game in 1992. This information was added to Success on the court -> Olympics. In the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section he also added some explanatory text to put the statistics within the article in their proper context. This information was gathered from the USAB archive, Jack McCallum's book/articles,and newspapers from 1989-1992. Both Christopher and Kevin worked on the initial improvement/Expansion Plan for the article. Kevin added the "Where are They Now? " section, but another editor thought the information was more relevant to the individual players' pages. Kevin compared the 1992 and 1996 teams and used the information he collected to help Gavin complete the table. This information came from the FIBA archive. Kevin and Gavin worked to rebuild the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section after a user removed the information. Michael was responsible for finding creditable sources we could use, general fact checking, sentence structure, and grammatical corrections. We think the article is ready to move up to a B-class article because it describes the events surrounding the Dream Team in great detail and has no bias. Having more images to better convey the team would be preferred, but it is extremely difficult to find images regarding this topic, that don't have a copyright.

Evolution of the Article

The initial page stated all the basic information about the team, but left out many things that modern accounts of the team stress as important. The "Forming the team" section initially had no subsections. It gave a description of all the players that made the team, but did not include much about why other players were left off. It also did not make clear why a college player made the team when there was no restriction on the amount of professionals that could be on the team. In the "Olympics" selection there was no mention of Barkley elbowing the Angolan player and how it effected the team's image. The "Legacy" selection included people's opinion about the greatest of the Dream Team compared to the 2012 team, but there was no concentrate comparison. The page made no mention of how the 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008,and 2012 teams compared statistically to the Dream Team. We added all these aspects to the page with our edits. In earlier versions of the page we tried to reorganize it by adding a "Controversy" section. Eventually the information in the "Controversy" section was moved to "Forming the team" section and "Olympics" section because another editor feared having a section called controversy implied some bias. An earlier version of the page also provided information about what the player on the Dream Team were up to currently, but this was also removed because an editor felt it was not completely relevant. We tried to add images to the page, but almost every picture involving the Dream or its players is copyrighted and belongs exclusively to the NBAE/Getty Images. We managed to find an image of Jordan practicing free throws in his Olympic warmups from Flickr. The image had Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic rights so we decide to add it to the page via Wikimedia Commons, but a few days later the image was taken down. We received no explication why. We added a table & legend in the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section of the article as a way to compare this team to other great teams, but it was removed because an editor said we could not use a compilation of statistics from individual games. We revised the comparison section by using sources that had already averaged the individual game stats into statistics for an entire Olympic run. The evolution of the article was based on the feedback we received on the talk page and WikiProject Basketball. Feedback from these places helped us correct formatting, content, and sources.

Learning Wikipedia Policies

Initially we wanted to include per36 and per100 statistics but a editor named Bagumba helped us realize that this level of statistics may not be a good idea to include in the article. There is no existing consensus in WikiProject Basketball or WikiProject NBA to have that level of detail in articles. We cited WP:NOTSTATSBOOK as our reasoning for not continuing to purse the per36 and per100 statistics. This policy basically states that excessive amounts of stats can be confusing to a causal readers, so limit the amount of statistically information in article when possibly. Also per WP:NOTSTATSBOOK we realized that "articles should contain sufficient explanatory text to put statistics within the article in their proper context for a general reader." This is why we included a short paragraph before the comparison table in the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section. Eventually we had to revise the "1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics" section altogether per WP:SECONDARY & WP:NOR The best practice would be to use the opinions of writers from secondary sources as our main source for comparing the teams. Since we had a very active editor looking over our edits we were better able to learn the policies that related to our article.

Community Experience/Interaction

We had a comment from 73.184.170.54 after our initial proposal. He reminded us to include Barley elbowing the Angolan player in the section about controversy. Bagumba has probably been our most active editor. He introduced us to WP:NOTSTATSBOOK and told us about WikiProject Basketball or WikiProject NBA. OnWikiProject Basketball H told us about he FIBA archive and were the find the stats for 1996 and 2000 teams. Bagumba tagged the "Controversy" section, because thought it was more neutral to not have a dedicated "Controversy" section per NPOV & Wikipedia:Criticism. He told us that roster decisions should be in the "Forming the team" section. Bagumba also said that players' fame and post-playing career are weakly related to their Olympic experience, and removed it for this reason. He also told us to add an explanation before the comparison stats in the last section. Bagumba interpreted the comparison table as a list of statistical categories that may bias the article since we picked out the categories from several categories on the FIBA archive. He encouraged us to use secondary sources, such as the opinion of writers. We followed much of the advise we got on the talk page because it was supported by Wikipedia policies. It benefitted us greatly to have someone familiar with these policies because it reassured us that our edits were valid. We only communicated with 3 people consistently, so it is difficult to call it a community, but they did help us whenever we asked for it.

Work Distribution

Gavin

• Comparison Table/ Revised Comparison Section
• Legend
• Research References
• Talk Page communication

Christopher

• Edit Forming the team/Olympics sections/1992-Present: Brief Overview of Team Statistics
• Improvement/Expansion Plan
• Research References
• Talk Page/WikiProject Basketball communication

Mike

• Spelling/Grammar/Sentence Structure Correction
• Fact Checking
• Research/Validate References
• Talk Page communication

Kevin

• Improvement/Expansion Plan
• Where are They Now? section/Comparison Table (1992 & 1996)/ Revised Comparison Section
• Research References
• Talk Page communication