Capital University

Wikipedia Project
Jumping the shark and The Short North

Paul Batterson, Todd Cecutti, Nick Komjati

ENGL 230, SPR 17
Dr. Sergey Rybas
February 25, 2017
Article #1: Jumping the shark

"Jumping the shark" means attempting to draw attention to or create publicity for something
that is perceived as not warranting the attention, especially something that is believed to be past
its peak in quality or relevance. The idiom "jumping the shark" is almost always used in a
pejorative sense. It is most commonly used in reference to gimmicks for promoting
entertainment outlets, such as television series, that are declining in popularity.
The Jumping the shark Wikipedia entry has been updated over 500 times since it first appeared
in 2003 as the following notation. Please note: theres no reference to the origin of the phrase or
to Happy Days from which the term is supposed to have originated. It is only two paragraphs:
Jumping the shark is an uncommon neologism derived from the website name
jumptheshark.com. It has specific reference to when any long-running television show
has been arbitarily judged to have passed its 'peak' and is in relative decline. A show in
decline is said to have jumped the shark.
According to the originators of the phrase there are a number of key signs that a show is
in decline. The signs include "Same character - different actor," "Death," "Birth," "Live,"
"Puberty," and "Singing."
The current entry is over 1,200 words long. In the month of February it was updated seven times
with the last being Feb. 16, 2017 by lovemylife9, who added an entry about JazzFest jumping
the shark. It was removed on the same day.

One of the main contributors has been Jon Hein, a radio personality who created the Jump the
Shark website. In 2006, he sold the Jump the Shark website to Gemstar for well over $1 million.
There are other many editors to the site including ClueBot, which investigates possible
vandalism on the site and others who correct small factual errors like the spelling of Donny
Most, the actor who played
Ralph Mouth on Happy
Days.

While I didnt find any

translations of the site beyond
English, there are several
contributors that from
different countries including
a fairly active one from Newfoundland.

Some of the reasons for the changes is the constant addition of new categories. For instance, it
added the term Nuke the Fridge, a phrase which means to exhaust a Hollywood franchise
with disappointing sequels. The term came from a 2008 TIME article referring to Indy Jones
and the Crystal Skull, in which Harrison Fords character emerges from an atomic bomb test
unscathed after hiding in a lead based refrigerator. On the Talk page of the Jumping the
shark entry, Nuking the fridge is discussed by users:

The entry on Jump the Shark meets most, if not all the criteria of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia:
 I t is encyclopedic. It gives more than a cursory view of the topic. In addition to the definition, it
gives an elaborate history of it, tracing it back to the Happy Days episode in which Fonzie
jumped over a shark.
Its neutral. Although the site is edited frequently by Hein,
it also appears to be neither a ringing endorsement of the
site or bashing it.
It is free content that anyone can use, edit, and
distribute. The content is readily available for
consumption on the Wikipedia page. It has many editors.
The citation mentions there are many books available on
the subject but it doesnt direct the reader to any of them.
Editors should treat each other with respect and
civility. The community seems to firmly regulate what
goes on the page and what doesnt but it doesnt rule the
site with a firm, rigid hand. When someone puts on an item that doesnt match up with the other
editors point of view it, it is removed but I have yet to see a case of a nasty conversation among
the groups. In the talk section, editors debate and explain their reasoning behind their inclusion
and deletion of information. It is not worthy that TV Guide recently bought the jumping the
shark website and effectively shut it down, so therefore all the links to the site were deleted off
the Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia has no firm rules. One of the tenants of this pillar is that the article may change over
time. It certainly has
evolved and expanded and
deleted certain aspects over
time.

One of the things that was

interesting was the
Wikipedias decision to
include Nuking the
Fridge yet to exclude
Growing the Beard,
which was supposedly the
antonym to Jumping the
Shark. Editors decided
since both George Lucas
and Steven Spielberg had made references to Nuking the Fridge in an interview in Newsweek
then it could be included. Growing the Beard was only referred to by the Straight Dope
Message Board and therefore should be not included.
Suggestions for improvement
One of the positive aspects of the Jumping the shark page was that it was broken down into
categories. For example, the Ted McGinley factor. McGinley was an actor that was perhaps
most known for his work in the Revenge of the Nerds series. However, he achieved a certain
amount of notoriety for being brought on to dying TV series with Happy Days, the Love Boat
and Married with Children falling off after he was added to the cast. Heins creativity in naming
the categories was almost as good as the content.

The website, TV tropes.org, lists over 40 ways in which a series can jump the shark but they lack
Heins creativity. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark
I posted this on the Wikipedia Talk page and have yet to get a response:

Article #2: The Short North

For a second Wikipedia article on which to report, our group felt it would be appropriate to
choose a page topic that was both local and underrepresented so that we could offer concrete and
knowledgeable suggestions for improvement. The page for The Short North met both of our
criteria. The Short North district is widely regarded as the central arts and culture district in
Columbus, attracting a wide variety of people for various types of events. Unfortunately, its
Wikipedia page is not representative of its importance to Columbus social and cultural identity.

The page: Classification, Talk, and statistics

The Short North page is classified by Wikipedia as Stub-class: Low importance (Fig. 1). All
very brief or poorly constructed/edited Wikipedia pages will fall into the category of
Stub-class. According to Wikipedia, stub-class identification can be removed by an editor
once it has been properly expanded to a larger article. Surely, there is enough content that could
be included on The Short North to expand it to Start-class, the identification for a properly
encyclopedic article. The importance scale rating of The Short North is based upon the
WikiProject assessment of an average Wikipedia users need to look up the topic. According to
WikiProjects Assessment page, a mid-importance article is only notable within its particular
field or subject and has achieved notability in a particular place or area. With focused efforts
(identified later in this essay) and additions to the page, The Short North article could be
considered notable as a destination for those seeking more information on the Short North.

Fig. 1

Since the first edit of the page in 2004, there have only been 161 subsequent edits. The inactivity
of the community is evidenced by the brief log of the Talk in the Revision section of the
Wikipedia article (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

The inactivity of The Short North is even more apparent when one views its revision history
statistics (Fig. 3). It shows that there are very few users interacting with the page, and from our
time on the Talk and History pages, it became clear that those users were mostly transient;
only a few select users were repeat contributors. The page also only has thirty Watchers. To
put this into perspective, the Columbus Wikipedia entry has 226. Despite the fact that there
have been 1,600 views of The Short North in the past month, there is on average about one
edit, and many of the edits were made to address graffiti on the page, as shown in Fig. 4.
 Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Proposed improvements and author conclusions

As a group, we composed and proposed three additional sections about events in the Short North
that draw significant amounts of people to the area and contribute to the areas social and cultural
importance in Columbus. These sections are Gallery Hop, Comfest, and Pride Festival
(Fig. 5). We identified ourselves as new users and included complete section entries, complete
with links to other Wikipedia pages and outside references; we are still awaiting response.
On top of the references that we proposed in our sections, the page could draw from a plethora of
national news and culture sources that identify the Short North as a hotspot.
 Fig. 5

When considering the future of The Short North on Wikipedia, our group identified several
focus areas that could elevate the page to being a helpful, relevant resource. First of all, a list of
businesses could be added to the page considering that the diversity of small business in the area
is a hallmark of Columbus. This could push businesses to create their own Wikipedia pages,
further legitimizing The Short North by making it more connected to a broad Wikipedia
community. We also think that a more comprehensive list of events/attractions could be
developed in addition to our proposed sections; there are countless independent and
city-sponsored events that occur in the area. A developed, comprehensive page could lead to
more user activity, which we think is the key to continuous improvement of the article.
Development and increased user activity, in concert, may allow the page to move past
Stub-class: low importance and into the Start class classification. Other city district pages
such as the U District in Seattle, WA and the Pearl District in Portland, OR are Start class, and
we think that the Short North is comparable to these districts in terms of their impact on their
cities. Ultimately, an individual with the time and know-how could easily transform The Short
North Wikipedia page into a relevant article that could be viewed by thousands of people
seeking information on the area per month, and our group sees this as an appropriate action for
the cultural hub of the city of Columbus, the Short North district.