User:Krtiffany1824/sandbox

Manic Pixie Dream Girl - Group Report

In beginning our edits for the Wikipedia page “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” we first read the page and discussed what information we wished had been there. The original article had many examples of the trope, but they were very poorly organized and hard to sift through. Further, we felt that the original article failed to contextualize the term — we wanted to give information about the evolution of its usage and cultural relevance, as way as supplementary information about feminist film theory and a spin-off of the term (“Manic Pixie Dream Boy”). To that end, we added most extensively to the “Criticism and Debate” and “Retraction of the Term” sections and did most of our formatting in the “Examples” section. We also made minor edits in the introduction of the article for clarity, added years of release to the first mention of each film in the article to make the chronology easier to understand, removed the example Fahrenheit 451 on the grounds that the first sentence of the article calls MPDG a piece of film terminology and nowhere does the article apply it to literature, made minor formatting changes and completely wiped out and rewrote the “See Also” links which were originally wildly unrelated to the article (E.g. “Mania,” “Pixie”). Most of our sources had to be journalistic — generally culture blogs or magazines — as this is the forum in which the term was discussed. In order to maintain Wikipedia’s standard of objectivity, we did not praise any one opinion on “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” but simply quoted the authors directly. We cited Jezebel, New York Magazine, Grantland and various other media outlets. The article evolved to be not only an explanation of the term but also a contextualized history of the term, giving examples of its application to films dating back almost 80 years. We had originally set out to provide a more comprehensive list of examples that we thought fit the term but realized that there was no way to do this without indulging in subjectivity and dedicating too much space spent on argumentation — instead we reorganized the sporadically placed but well-cited examples that the article already had. We think that the article is now much easier to read, much more understandable as an explanation of a cultural phenomenon and much more useful in finding links to other information that is relevant to the topic.

In the beginning, our familiarity with Wikipedia’s policies and its markup language was next to nothing. We posted direct URLs before learning how to cite them properly, and occasionally forgot to sign our username at the end of our contributions. However, as time passed, we picked up on these things, be it from other users or simply looking them up from the Wikipedia help page. Regarding the technical aspects of our Wikipedia experience, we spent time testing things out in our personal sandboxes before applying it to our main article.

A user named Lawikitejana reached out to us and posted helpful tutorial on Kaitlyn’s talk page to get us used to Wikipedia’s policies. Further, we used the information that we gained in class about writing citations, linking to other pages and formatting lists on Wikipedia to help us in revising our article. Anthony took on the task of learning how to create the Wiki-formatted table that would become the main feature of the page’s “Examples” section. Lawikitejana was invaluable to us, leaving helpful comments on the article talk page after we proposed our edits, and even going through old “MPDG” talk page posts and pointing us towards unresolved issues that we might address (e.g. broken and incorrect links). The actions of Lawikitejana and other Wikipedians made us feel as if we were in a community, with the communal goal of bettering an article. Our positive experiences from other Wikipedians felt welcoming and encouraged us to post meaningful content.

After everything, we do not believe the article on Manic Pixie Dream Girl is worthy of being classified as a B-class article. Although the average reader will leave with a better understanding of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the topic itself simply does not have enough information out there to merit a B-class Wikipedia article,

Every member of our group contributed to the conceiving of our additions, sources and the minor edits that we did on the original article. Anthony was our formatting expert, while Mo wrote the new “Manic Pixie Dream Boy” and “Retraction of the Term” sections, Kaitlyn wrote the expanded “Criticism and Debate” section, and Rachel wrote the “Male Gaze” section and did much of the formatting of the article. The group members coordinated through email and group text and worked constantly out of shared Google Docs in order to ease communication and remove the burden from one group leader.