User:Zrauf124/sandbox

My name is Zeeshan and this is my sandbox.

I am working on a class project to edit topics related to Occupy Wall Street with Sofia Rivas and Olivia Hauger. We are going to be working and editing our article on Sofia Rivas' sandbox.

 Finalize your topic / Find your sources (October 10) 

Our group plans to add a new section to the Occupy Wall Street Wikipedia page to discuss institutional and corporate responses to the social movement. We want to talk about the actions that corporations took in response to the claims, allegations, and protests against them. We want to focus on financial institutions, and how they changed their compensation figures, hiring practices, and branding. We also want to answer how financial institutions and corporations tried to re-integrate themselves into society after being accused of greed and creating income inequality. Lastly, we think it would also be interesting to write about whether these responses, 7 years later, were actually genuine or just a farce.

Below is a list of articles and books that we can cite and use for our contributions.
 * 1) Conover MD, Ferrara E, Menczer F, Flammini A (2013) The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street. PLoS ONE 8(5): e64679. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064679
 * 2) Mark Tremayne (2014) Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street, Social Movement Studies, 13:1, 110-126, DOI:10.1080/14742837.2013.830969
 * 3) Omarova, Saule T. “WALL STREET AS COMMUNITY OF FATE: TOWARD FINANCIAL INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 159, no. 2, 2011, pp. 411–492. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41038809
 * 4) Ruth, Van Gelder Sarah. This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement. Berrett-Koehler, 2011

Choose Possible Topics Assignment (September 29)

Not all of these have dedicated wikipedia pages, some are included in the Occupy Wall Street page.

Topic 1: Occupy Wall Street Protests. We’re interested in the protests that occurred outside of NY or Zuccotti Park, such as universities or other countries. (Included in Occupy movement) We think we can expound on some of the specific protests, especially the ones in different countries, and how their motivations were similar/dissimilar with those of others. Also, we can include more of the university protests that occurred, as only Cal is mentioned on the occupy page right now.

Topic 2: Occupy Cal Movement. We’re interested in how the Occupy Wall Street movement affected Cal, and how it might have changed the culture of the Berkeley population, specifically career interests. We can add in how, if at all, the campus movement influenced the career choices of the Berkeley campus, specifically towards careers in business/finance. We realize it might be a little difficult to find info on this.

Topic 3: Lack of organized Agenda in the Occupy Movement. We’re interested in how and why the movement had a lack of clearly defined goals/demands and how that affected the success of the movement. (Included in Occupy Wall Street page). We can try to include if anyone tried to establish a clearer and more organized agenda.

Topic 4: Responses to OWS. We’re interested in how financial institutions and corporations responded to the claims, allegations, and protests from OWS. (Reactions to Occupy Wall Street. This is currently not included at all, so we will be adding brand new content, and can focus on if financial institutions attempted to change their culture or their compensation practices.

Topic 5: OWS leaders and prominent figures. OWS was a mostly leaderless movement, but we’re interested in researching if there were any notable organizers/leaders/supporters. (Included in Occupy Wall Street page) Currently there is no information on people that emerged as leaders of the movement, either at a local or national level, and we want to include if any leaders did exist.

 Articles we want to focus on 

Article 1: Lack of organized Agenda in the Occupy Movement. This topic is included in the Occupy Wall Street page very briefly as one of the criticisms to the movement. However, we think we can improve the article by elaborating more on why clearly established demands were never set, and how that influenced the protests and reactions to the movement. Some argue that demands such as social equality can never be achieved, which is why they were not stated as the demands of the movement, but we think we can help answer why smaller goals were never established.

Article 2: Responses/Reactions to OWS. The responses to OWS are included in the page Reactions to Occupy Wall Street. We want to specifically focus on the reactions of financial institutions, which are sparsely mentioned on this page. We want to add the actions that financial institutions took in response to this movement. This includes self-imposed regulations/rules, change in company culture, compensation, and minority programs. The actions don't need to be immediately following the start of the Movement, but we want to highlight how, if at all, financial institutions tried to repair their public image.

Article 3: OWS leaders and prominent figures. This is included in the Occupy Wall Street page. This page includes a little bit about leaders and prominent figures, but we think there's substantial opportunity to expand the content. For example, the Occupy Wall Street page includes the sentence, "Even with the perception of a movement with no leaders, leaders have emerged," but does not mention any of the leaders that emerged. We think that we can find and highlight a few prominent leaders, and how their leadership influenced the movement.

Article Evaluation (September 15)

Article Link: We are the 99%

I evaluated an article related to my interest in the Occupy Movement.

This article does a mixed job of including content relevant to the topic. There is a substantial amount of loosely related economic/financial content that is not directly relevant to the slogan, which serves as the topic in this article. However, I admit that it is difficult for this article to be completely on topic, as it overlaps with the Occupy page.

The content is mostly neutral, except for a few sentences that could be improved. For example, the article states that the slogan “reflects an opinion that the '99%' are paying the price for the mistakes of a tiny minority within the upper class.” In reality, this is only one of the opinions that the slogan represents. The article, however, does a great job of including a lot of unbiased economic data that provides evidence both for and against the platforms of many individuals that employ this slogan.

Most of the links on the article function properly, with a few that link to deleted pages/posts. The sources are mostly reliable, but there are a few blogs cited that could be replaced with more credible sources. In addition, I noticed that popular news outlets, such as CNN and The NYT, were often cited as sources. After clicking on some of these links, I noticed that even the CNN/NYT source articles didn’t have a citation or a direct link to the primary source material. I’m not sure how large of an issue this is, or whether this is commonplace.

Overall, I think the article does a good job of explaining the topic in an unbiased way, and I think it serves an important purpose by helping people better understand the Occupy Movement.