Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Cornell University/Online Communities (Fall 2013)/Hyundai Sonata

Wikipedia Project: Final Report

Contribution to the Article

For this Wikipedia page, we added and organized the different categories and content to the existing article. The article’s structure was laid out in a comprehensive format, but the article required a lot of minor changes and edits. There were some minor grammar errors, missing citations, and incorrect citations that brought the user to a link that didn’t exist. We will talk about the details of what we changed in the “Evolution of the Article,” but we were able to find more information through Korean websites to validate whether or not the information was correct. Jihea was able to find articles that dated back to late 1980s to verify the information online. Moreover, Theo was able to find information on awards and the new hybrid model. Danielle updated sales and found citations for the numbers. Overall, we all updated the content, and overall organize and make minor changes so that the readers could more easily conceive the information.

Our biggest contribution is the addition of the 2013 Hyundai Hybrid. There wasn’t a lot of information in that section, so we added the content with hot updated information. Moreover, the verification of all the content was also very important. We realized that many readers read Wikipedia, and perceive information as if they were completely true. In fact, many and most articles actually have accurate data. As a C-Class article that missed a lot of citations, we wanted to actually verify all the information and changed everything that we couldn’t find and identified the one’s that needed citations.

Despite our contributions, we do not feel that this article is ready to become a B-class article yet. There does not seem to be as much information about the Hyundai Sonata as compared with other B-class articles. We think part of the reason for this is that most of the information returned by search engines about previous generations of the Sonata are centered around user reviews and where to buy them. Moreover, according to TeaHouse people, we aren't allowed to use the publications and reports that refer to the Hyundai Sonata website, for it looks promotional. It was hard to find actual credible sources that we could cite other than blogs and not-so-famous forums. It was hard to find a website that tracked the sales data of more than 10 years. Even other Wikipedians wrote on the page in 2011 regarding this aspect. Also, while there is a subset of Wikipedians who seem genuinely interested in the Hyundai Sonata, this group seems rather small and selecting a single car model targets a small niche in the community, so we are not sure how much users will add after we are done and how many users regularly visit the page/have a need for the information on it.

Evolution of the Article

When we first decided to edit the Hyundai Sonata article, the awards section was unorganized and outdated, the sales table only reflected US sales which had no references, and the general overview was short and didn’t convey the general concept of the car. Although there was not that much information on the Hyundai Sonata page before we started, there was a skeleton outline to the page that we followed, adding more details and subsections to each section within the existing page organization. In the beginning we had to spend time looking for valid references to use to update the information, hence we began first editing the awards section of the article as we were able to find a multitude of valid sources.

Now the awards section is up to date and organized by year. Most of the references are added for the awards with the exception of those we could not find, and left those ones with “citations needed”. We added the section about the 2013 Sonata Hybrid. Previously, there was only information on older Sonata Hybrids and covered basic information such as fuel efficiency/mileage and awards. The section we added went into more depth on the 2013 Hybrid, describing specs (fuel efficiency, cost, weight, etc.), improvements over previous generation Sonata Hybrids, standard/optional features, and safety ratings. After looking through many articles, and referencing the guidelines for valid sources, we updated the sales information. We were unable to update the information the way we had planned, such as including European sales because valid sources were lacking, however, we managed to find one secondary source that listed the Canadian and US sales for the past decade. We thus updated this into the table, incorporating its source. We were unable to validate the information of the sales before 2001, hence left the information alone, and added a “citation needed” to the top of the section header. We also removed the 2000 US sales entry from the table as the value was 666, which seemed like a highly unlikely sales value given all the other sales numbers, and we could not locate the actual sales value. We were also considering adding in a new section about the future Seventh-generation Sonata, however while exploring around the Wikipedia community, we found that rumored information is frowned upon, and the information we found about the Seventh-generation Sonata was very limited since it has yet to be released with its new specifications.

Our sources primarily came from reputable online sources that are car-focused, such as Car and Driver, Edmund’s, Kelley Blue Book, etc. These sources cover a lot of information about the cars, from specs to test-drives to safety information.

Community Experience

The community experience we had in terms of interactions with others on Wikipedia for the most part was a positive experience. After posting the initial course assignment onto the Hyundai Sonata talk page, Mr.Choppers, an experienced Wikipedia editor who is fascinated by cars, welcomed us and gave us advice on how to get started. We also asked him a few questions we had on the layout of the article along with resources we could use, in which he promptly replied back to us, saying that our ideas seem fine. This was more beneficial to our Wikipedia experience as it was nice to know there was a person who knew about cars willing to help us.

We also posted a question to another person’s talk page, Rsirkanth05, whom had previously written on the Hyundai Sonata talk page. Although it had been quite a while since he had edited the Hyundai Sonata article, he was kind enough to reply back to us, although he could not provide us with much useful information. This did not have much impact in terms of our Wikipedia experience.

To get more help figuring out which resources we could user or not, we also turned to the TeaHouse. This we felt was a community of its own as it felt as though there were people constantly checking the site and answering questions of those who needed help. We first decided to check out the Live Help link in the Tea House which took us to a forum similar to instant messaging, and we asked about how to organize and format citations. Within a few minutes we received a reply back with instructions to check out the Resources Page of Wikipedia. Being able to interact on a live talk was beneficial to our experience as it allowed us to get simple answers at a very fast pace. We also used the regular TeaHouse question posting, which was also very helpful as we received a reply back relatively quickly and the answer was very straightforward. We were told that we could not use information from the Hyundai website as it was a primary document. Interacting using the TeaHouse was a very beneficial experience as not only did we get our answers answered, but we could also explore past people’s questions and answers as another way of learning new tips to using Wikipedia. We also liked how interacting with the TeaHouse was very simple to use as it did not use the same formatting that is used when editing articles. Asking a question using the TeaHouse was a lot simpler.

For the most part, although we did attempt to interact with other Wikipedia editors, we did not feel like we were a real part of the community as most of our responses were very limited. The TeaHouse however, did feel like a community as it was interesting to see how there are so many dedicated editors willing to help out new people such as us by answering basic questions. It felt a lot more comfortable asking questions on the TeaHouse than on other editor’s talk pages as it was the norm for people to ask very basic and simple questions on the TeaHouse, while on the talk pages, it was more of a norm to write formally and discuss items relevant to a topic they are active in, versus basic policies on Wikipedia.

Responsibility Breakdown

The group members: Jihea Khil, Danielle Lee, and Theo Park edited the Hyundai Sonata Wikipedia page. All the editors participated in improving and editing the content and interacting with other Wikipedians on the article's and individuals' Talk Page, and asking questions on TeaHouse. The group was able to make a significant contributions to the article by breaking down the tasks depending on each individual's strength.

Jihea Khil researched the overall information on Korean websites about Hyundai Sonata to validate whether or not the information listed on the Wikipedia was accurate and up to date. She eventually focused on gathering information for the six different generations of the Sonata. Since the general overview didn't fully capture how the car looked like, she changed and added more content. Moreover, she added more information for first to fourth generation. As for communication, she was in charge of talking with those who contacted her directly or commented on the actual Hyundai Sonata Talk Page. She was able to get some positive feedback and guidelines on how to diminish white spaces and being respectful and careful when editing content. Jihea was also in charge of the technical aspects and organizing information to upload to Wikipedia.

Danielle Lee was in charge of finding resources and proper citation for sales. She looked into the official Hyundai Sonata website, automobile sites, and other blogs to find information on US and Canada sales. Since there were no proper citations for US sales, she tried to look at websites to compare where they gathered the data. It was hard to find information for sales data that dated more than 10 years ago. Regarding the citations and references, she also talked to people on Teahouse about whether or not it is applicable to list official Hyundai Sonata sales as references. She updated looked up information on how to fix redundant citations, and applied it to the awards section.

Theo Park was in charge of retrieving information on the recent Sonata Hybrid and Awards. He researched many articles on the web and on academic databases to see how people perceived the new Hyundai Sonata Hybrid. With the data collected, he created a new subsection in the Sonata Hybrid Section called, "2013 Sonata Hybrid." Moreover, he was able to find more information on the different awards Hyundai Sonata received and updated information. As for the communication part, Theo was able to interact with other Wikipedians on their Talk Page.