User:Alexliow/sandbox

3D Printing Group Report

Team Members: Linda Gao, Alex Liow, Carol Wu and Charlie Xu

Article Contributions

Creation of History Section by Merging in Portions of the Terminology Section

• The former introduction of the 3D printing article consisted of a huge paragraph of information. Of course, the introduction of any article page should provide sufficient background so that users can glean a sense of what the topic that they have a chance to learn further information about. However, we believe that some of this material fit better under a History section, so we decided to create it.
• Therefore, we merged in some information about 3D printing terminology (which was included in the introductory section) with historical information, also splitting out the formation of different methods (and the terminology referring to them) from the development of applications for the technology.
• Previously, much of the information was repeated or interrelated, and the introductory section of the page went too in-depth about some specifics, which drew away from the purpose of an introduction to 3D printing. Now, with our edits, we believe that if the reader is interested in the history of 3D printing, specifically either its methods and terminology or the development of its applications, they have a better idea of where to find the information that they need.

Reorganization of Applications Section

• Before we began to edit the 3D printing page, we noticed that there was a section titled 'Applications' that had many, many subsections. These subsections seemed to have been in a random order, and we believe that it made the user experience rather difficult. This was such a major portion of the 3D printing article, so we thought it was very necessary to reorganize this section somehow so that we can improve the logical flow and hopefully contribute to a more comfortable and informational user experience.
• To do so, we first examined the current content under the former Applications Section. We noticed that all of the current subsections could have been better organized into three more descriptive sections: Manufacturing Applications, Industrial Applications, and Sociocultural Applications. 'Manufacturing Applications' was a better description for the subsections regarding the use of 3D printing for large scale production. 'Industrial Applications' helped to describe subsections relating to using 3D printing in specific industrial sectors. Lastly, 'Sociocultural Applications' encompassed any subsections that described 3D printing's utility in relation to the greater society and culture.
• In regards to how we decided which subsections would "fit" under these newly created sections, we read through the information that other users had contributed. We then tried to see if the content of those subsections fit in with the definitions that we had formulated for each of the new Application sections. Furthermore, we listed the subsections in alphabetical order in order to maintain some official form of categorization and/or organization.

Improvement of Grammar and Structure

• The existing content of the page has been edited to reduce grammatical errors and improve overall style. The content has also been edited to improve the readability of sections for the average reader, through the explanation or reduction of technical terminology, rephrasing and re-structuring of confusing and/or ambiguous information, and other similar changes. For example, relevant content was merged into paragraphs where before they were separated by other ideas in the same section.
• Previously, due to the nature of Wikipedia itself, much of the information may have been strewn together without much thought to the style and flow of the information. We hope that our contributions to the improvement of the grammar and structure will enhance the accessibility of the page.

Community Experience

Feedback from External Wikipedians on 3D Printing Talk Page

• Initially, in our proposed article edits, we mentioned that we wanted to include a list of 3D printing equipment. However, a fellow Wikipedia, Fountains of Bryn Mawr commented that the article should be self contained -- that this article should not become some sort of directory. We decided that we didn't have a good idea of how to turn such a list into an important section or subsection of the article, so we abstained. This interaction was positive, because we learned about what type of content was acceptable in our edits.

Reaching Out to External Wikipedians

• Early on, Linda tried to reach out to Fountains of Bryn Mawr by writing on the user's talk page after seeing his quick feedback on our project proposal. However, he did not respond. Carol tried to follow up by also writing on the talk page in the section that Linda created. Disappointingly, we still received no response.
• After not receiving the support that we had initially hoped from more experienced Wikipedians, we recently tried again to reach out to other users. We looked at the history of the 3D printing page and tried to look at any users that had made many edits to the page in the recent past. We picked two, Bruce1ee and Thumperward, and reached out by writing on their talk pages here and here. Because these requests for feedback are more recent, we have not yet received responses.

External Wikipedians Reaching Out to Us

• On Linda's, Alex's and Carol's talk pages, Timtrent was very kind to have left us messages pointing us to the student training material as well as many other helpful resources that Wikipedia had to offer. Additionally, Timtrent let us know that we could always ask him for advice by reaching out to him through his talk page.

Teahouse Experience

• About halfway into the project, Carol decided to make a profile (if you scroll down on the guest profile pages, Carol's introduction is about two-thirds of the way down) on Teahouse and introduce herself to Teahouse hosts.
• Something we really wanted to improve on the 3D printing page was the accessibility of the article. Therefore, we knew that it would be important to edit and improve the structure of the page in some manner so that it was more readable to the average reader. Therefore, Carol asked a question regarding this concern on the Teahouse/Questions talk page.
• In less than 24 hours, Fuhghettaboutit and MadScientistX11 both responded with really great suggestions. Generally speaking, they suggested that we either look at the structure of Wikipedia's featured articles or look at the structure of articles regarding a similar topic. From these suggestions, we looked at pages such as 3D scanning and 3D modeling for some form of guidance.
• Overall, we were really pleased with how supportive Wikipedians could be and how quickly they were able to respond with thoughtful feedback and advice.

Feedback from Instructors and Peers

• The professor commented on our page early on with suggestions on the types of improvements we could make to the page. In particular, she mentioned that, in addition to our planned changes in content and organization, we could improve on the criteria preventing it from being classified as a B-class article. Based on these suggestions, we decided to edit the grammar and structure of the page and try to make the content more accessible to readers. The organizational changes we planned would help with these, but we also decided to try to edit any particularly technical language and to expand our organizational changes so that relevant content can be more easily found.
• Tyler gave us feedback on possibly expanding a sub-article on rapid prototyping. We took his feedback into consideration and debated on the merits of expanding this article vs. the sub-article. However, we felt that building the rapid prototyping article from its current state as a stub article would require more knowledge and resources than we had personally. Our knowledge on 3D printing was more broad from the general research we had done, and we already had many organizational and structural changes planned out and had started editing some of the content.