Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Cornell University/Online Communities (Fall 2013)/Cold air damming

Requirements[edit]

Due: Thursday October 10, 1:25pm

After you have completed all your communications with other editors and finalized your edits on the article you have been working on in the past few weeks, generate a report that addresses the following:

Your contribution to the article in terms of the changes you have made in the article. Add details about content, formatting, style, organization, multimedia, links, etc. Describe where you got the information for these changes and what sources you used. Do you think the article now ready to move up from a C-Class to a B-Class? Why or why not?
The evolution of the article in terms of what it was like when you started, what changes you made when, and how the current revision is different from the one when you just started. What contributed to the way that the article evolved?
The community experience you had in terms of interactions with others through article pages, talk pages, or other means. Describe specific interactions, who they were with, and whether they were beneficial or detrimental to your Wikipedia experience (anonymize names of those you had negative interactions with). Did you feel that you were in a community? Why or why not?
A detailed breakdown of who did what in this project in terms of content, communication, and technical aspects.

Each group has a special talk page that is linked from the table above to a place to put up your final report.

Response[edit]

Your contribution to the article in terms of the changes you have made in the article. Add details about content, formatting, style, organization, multimedia, links, etc. Describe where you got the information for these changes and what sources you used. Do you think the article now ready to move up from a C-Class to a B-Class? Why or why not?[edit]

Significant technical content that details the atmospheric processes affecting the erosion of Cold Air Damming, classification of CAD events in the southeastern U.S., and the challenges in predicting CAD events.
Images depicting a real world case of Cold Air Damming, and the actual meteorological imagery of the event: model output plots, satellite imagery, and upper air soundings.
The article contained 13,327 bytes when we started editing, by the end it contained 26,449 bytes, meaning that after editing we added a net of 13,112 bytes. This means that we nearly doubled the size of the article. As stated above, this increase in size is significant because it includes expert technical information, several technical images, and mathematical formulas. This means that we expanded not only the size, but the scope of the article.
Our sources were several research papers, 1-2 websites, and a meteorology text book by Gary Lackmann. The table below contains a detailed list:

Sources
Gary Lackmann. 2012. "Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, & Forecasting". American Meteorological Society.
Bailey et al. 2002. "An Objective Climatology, Classification Scheme, and Assessment of Sensible Weather Impacts for Appalachian Cold-Air Damming". Weather and Forecasting, American Meteorological Society.
Stiver, Clayton. "Cold Air Damming: Setup, Forecast Methods/Challenges for the Eastern US". Retrieved 3 October 2013.
Smith, Ronald B (1982). "Synoptic Observations and Theory of Orographically Disturbed Wind and Pressure.". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 39: 60–70.

While the article was a good resource before we began to improve it, it read as though it were oriented towards a lay-person as a general overview of CAD and lacked the technical information regarding the dynamic atmospheric processes that influence CAD. The addition of technical information regarding: Detection, Erosion, Classifying Southeastern United States Events, andPrediction; means the article is useful for those interested in the specifics of Cold air damming that one would find in high-level meteorological texts and research papers.
Regarding the improvement from a C=>B class article, our changes satisfy these criteria. Here are the reader experiences as detailed by Wikipedia's article grading scheme:

Useful to a casual reader, but would not provide a complete picture for even a moderately detailed study.
— -Wikipedia's article grading scheme, C-class

Readers are not left wanting, although the content may not be complete enough to satisfy a serious student or researcher.
— -Wikipedia's article grading scheme, B-class

Useful to nearly all readers, with no obvious problems; approaching (but not equalling) the quality of a professional encyclopedia.
— -Wikipedia's article grading scheme, GA-class

By our estimation the article is at least a B-class article: the article now addresses the core overview and the more technical aspects of CAD events, and contains images and equations to illustrate this information. For a casual reader, the article will still provide an overview of Cold air damming. But now, with our improvements, more serious readers, meteorologists, and meteorology students will find the article addresses the dynamic processes they are familiar with or learning about. While the article doesn't go into extreme detail of these processes, since they are not unique to CAD events, it will familiarize people with the processes associated with Cold air damming and prepare them to read source material instead of encyclopedic material. While a serious researcher already familiar with CAD from their own studies would likely find this article a sufficient overview of the phenomenon, they would find that it does not address all the research and knowledge of the Cold air damming.

The evolution of the article in terms of what it was like when you started, what changes you made when, and how the current revision is different from the one when you just started. What contributed to the way that the article evolved?[edit]

As stated earlier, when we started the article was ~13,000 bytes in size: Cold air damming before project
The current version is ~26,000 bytes in size, meaning that we roughly doubled the content of the article.
The following sections were added: Detection, Erosion, Classifying Southeaster United States Events, Prediction
Illustrative images and formula were added to these sections to support the textual content that we added.
Minor changes and additions were made to other sections including Locations, Development, moving of images, and adding wikilinks to other articles.
Our initial plans were to expand on the existing sections, finding sources and adding paragraphs. However, these plans changed as we performed more research. Instead, we focused on adding new sections, equations, and images tailored to towards the more technical aspects of CAD that are familiar to professionals, researchers, and students. This was because we found research papers that contained this information, and we believed expanding the scope of the article would be a more important contribution.
We also had assistance and suggestions from wikipedian Thegreatdr ("The great doctor") when it came to organizing references, adding images, links, and clarifying our content paragraphs.
We were continually researching and learning new information about CAD, therefore we progressively added new sections on the material that we could understand. Generally speaking, this was done one whole section/subsection at a time, in short bursts of contributions by one group member at a time. Because the article was already well written and organized before we started editing, we found little need to rearrange or edit earlier contributions
After writing a new section, we would then read it over immediately and make edits, or one of us would come back at a later time and edit/refine new material.
Our approach to references also evolved with time. Our earlier references were poorly formatted. However, after referring to the wiki help pages and with some assistance from our collaboratorThegreatdr, we were able to organize and condense the references to which we used for different sections.
Mathematical formula were challenging to add, but we realized they were necessary to properly explain some of the atmospheric dynamics involved with Erosion, and the detection algorithm. It took a lot of practice and trial & error to figure out how to properly use LaTeX to create formula. At first we tried to use online LaTeX translators that would assist in constructing the LaTeX markup; however, these produced code that Wikipedia could not parse. Therefore, Tyler had to us the Displaying a formula article to learn how to create valid LaTeX markup. Eventually this was successful, and it enable us to add two important mathematical formulas, which are shown in a section further down this page.
Images were uploaded and added in the last week of the project. All of them directly from the public domain, or are derived from images/data in the public domain. This is because the majority of meteorological surface plots, upper air plots, and satellite imagery is held in the public domain and freely accessible from either online archives or through Cornell. However, access to these sources was limited given the recent federal budget crisis, which forced us to find images that were still in the public domain but were used in other publications. So we contacted the authors and publishers of these images to make sure the use of these images was acceptable, even though we are confident they are in the public domain.

The community experience you had in terms of interactions with others through article pages, talk pages, or other means. Describe specific interactions, who they were with, and whether they were beneficial or detrimental to your Wikipedia experience (anonymize names of those you had negative interactions with). Did you feel that you were in a community? Why or why not?[edit]

Our interaction with the wikipedia community was fairly limited.
Our article only had talk from two users: Thegreatdr, and WindRunner. These two were the the primary content contributors to the article. There were several other editors who made smaller contributions, but were inactive on the talk page.
Thegreatdr was quite helpful, suggesting methods of organizing our references, editing & refining content, adding images to the new sections we added, and how to maintain article flow.
Outside of the article we found the existing template and guide articles sufficient to answering most of our questions. We found the Displaying a formula page extremely helpful for creating mathematical formulas in LaTeX. Also templates for displaying images, creating references for different types of sources, and formatting tables for this report and organizing our efforts on the talk page.
We had minimal interaction when we nominated our article for Did you know, and we were denied for not meeting the five fold expansion criteria. In this situation, we simply received a brief message notifying us that our article was insufficiently expanded.
Thankfully we had no negative interactions with wikipedians. Thegreatdr was very helpful, and as a wikipedian he has a huge amount of experience, having contributed to over a hundred meteorology articles.
Because of our studies, we were very aware that we were participating in a community; however, our contributions felt more similar to a partnership with Thegreatdr and between the three of us in the project group. There was also community engagement Away From Keyboard, via face-to-face interactions our classmates who were also working on Wikipedia articles.
Even though we are contributing within the networked public that that is wikipedia, we found, as stated above, that our experience felt more similar to a partnership or team experience. This is likely due to the fact that the Cold air damming page is not a popular article. The article simply is not relevant to many individuals outside the field of meteorology. Additionally, this article hasn't had a large number of contributors, or activity on the talk page; meaning that article hadn't attracted large amounts of attention, and very few wikipedians(if any) have the article on their watch list. Another reason for the low activity on the article is that Cold air damming is niche subject, and requires significant knowledge in the field of meteorology, especially atmospheric dynamics and synoptic analysis, to understand. Therefore, a reader who is trying to educate themselves or just came across the article won't believe they have the qualifications to contribute to the article, and would be hesitant or unwilling to make any edits for fear of making a mistake.
Over the entire lifespan of this article from 12/10/2007 => 10/08-2013 the Cold air damming page received ~25,000 total views, or an average of 12 views/day. Compare this to the Meteorology article which receives ~1,100 views/day(nearly 100 times more traffic), has contributions nearly every month, and 26 sections on its talk page. Also if one examines the top list of popular pages one will notice that many of the articles are pop-culture, geography, or recent-events oriented. These statistics help illustrate how small of an article Cold air damming is compared to the scale of Wikipedia.
These statistics help explain why Cold air damming has received relatively little attention. The article, while of decent quality, simply isn't relevant to enough users(as illustrated by its low daily pageviews). While these statistics may seem harsh, they are an accurate assessment Cold air damming's relevance to users.
While this group's contribution to the article is mostly complete, it will undoubtedly continue to receive attention. Our group has contacted the Meteorology Project, and with any luck they will continue to improve the article. We have also contacted some of the authors of the research we used, luckily Meteorology, as a field, is small enough where that is possible.

A detailed breakdown of who did what in this project in terms of content, communication, and technical aspects.[edit]

As stated earlier we added the following sections: Detection, Erosion, Classifying Southeastern United States Events, Prediction
We uploaded and placed the following images:

Images added to Cold air damming for Education_Program:Cornell_University/Online_Communities_(Fall_2013)

The following mathematical formula were also added, and were coded using the LaTeX technical markup language, which is standard on Wikipedia and scientific publications:

Formula	Explanation
$Ri={\frac {g\Delta \theta _{v}/\theta _{v}}{[(\Delta U)^{2}+(\Delta V)^{2}]/\Delta Z}}$	This is the Bulk Richardson Number and is used in the Cold air damming - Erosion section. Our group created this formula in LaTeX, and when we linked to the Bulk Richardson Number article, we realized that article didn't have a formula for its topic, so we shared the formula on the Bulk Richardson Formula - Talk Page. We sourced the formula from Gary Lackmann's Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting(2012), specifically his chapter on Cold air damming.
$\nabla ^{2}x={\frac {{\frac {x_{3}-x_{2}}{d_{2-3}}}-{\frac {x_{2}-x_{1}}{d_{1-2}}}}{{\frac {1}{2}}(d_{2-3}+d_{1-2})}}$	This is the detection algorithm from Bailey et al. An Objective Climatology, Classification Scheme, and Assessment of Sensible Weather Impacts for Appalachian Cold-Air Damming.(2002). The algorithm uses the stations depicted in the image we uploaded of [[:

Communication between the three group members was facilitated through email (Cornell Cmail), each group member was responsible for communicating and coordinating their activities over email. Email messages were used to summarize one's work when a large contribution/edit was made, share sources, or request assistance. Face-to-face interactions before/after class-time were also used to coordinate our efforts. When individuals needed to get into contact immediately, we either called or text-messaged each-other. To communicate what was performed during each edit to the article's source-code, we used Wikipedia's built in Edit Summary field at the bottom of the edit form.
Each group member contributed to the article in different ways. Adam Epstein(Cornellwx) worked on the more technical sections of the article, where strong knowledge of meteorology and atmospheric dynamics was needed; he created Erosion, Classifying Southeastern United States Events, Detection, found sources, and was the meteorology expert in the group. William Tyler Nebel(Nebelmeister goes by "Tyler"), has some knowledge of meteorology having taken several courses with Cornell's Atmospheric Science Department, and worked on the Prediction section, uploading and placing images, formula writing in LaTeX, making initial contact with collaborators, and drafting project documents outside of the article. Victoria Burke (Victory of the Burgh) made contributions to the Location section, her Sandbox to test formatting and writing sections before adding them to the actual article (which was helpful when first learning wiki-markup), she researched source, and edited/refined/formatted what we had added to the article. She was the IP address 108.12.58.237 when she forgot to login on the 8th.
As stated earlier, communication was largely everyone's own responsibility. Tyler and Adam communicated with collaborator Thegreatdr, and notified the group of changes they made. Victoria, while not the most vocal group member, helped with formatting and editing the sections when they were being worked on in the sandbox; her communications helped when Adam or Tyler had difficulty with references or templates.
Technically, each group member worked on learning the wiki markup language and used it to the best of their ability. Victoria had the most experience at the beginning, but Adam and Tyler had caught up by the end. Tyler became quite proficient at writing in wiki-markup & LaTeX, and was responsible for uploading and placing images. Victoria (already familiar with wiki markup) helped with formatting references, and formatting sections in her sandbox before adding them to the article.