User:Tu Ma Spring 2008

1. Do you prefer a Wikipedia or a YouTube/Flickr project? I'de like to do a Wikipedia project.

2. What topics / ideas interest you for a possible project? I would like to do a project related to sports. I'll update it more when I think of a good topic for research.

3. What skills or resources could you contribute to a project? My endless knowledge and understanding of sports and fan responses. I am a sport management major, and following sports has been an interest of mine for twelve years.

1. Objective I'm proposing to edit a pre-existing wikipedia page. But I wish to make much more detailed and informative than it currently is. I want to show which sports teams' cities fans have the greatest tendencies of being "fair weather fans."

2. Interest For people interested in sports or human tendencies, this is interesting on a few levels. One being research on the tendency to want to associate oneself with winning and success, while abandoning that same group if they are eventually less successful. On a more basic level, this is interesting to sports fans to see if their city is more loyal to their team than their rivals city, for example. This project could also potentially prove or disprove the long standing stereotype of bandwagon/fair weathered fans in general.

3. Background reading I'll do my background reading on this project through the few available wikipedia pages that relate to what I am researching, websites and articles on the subject, and any sociological information that relates to the idea in our text book.

       1. I will find statistical data from teams websites on average attendence in corolation with winning and losing    records. I'll post the links for this in here.
       2. Two websites I will use im particular are baseball-reference.com and football-reference.com. These will be used to find past attendence records. I will also look for blogs, newspaper and magazine articles, and anything else I can take advantage of on wikipedia to fully complete this research.

4. General plan My general plan as of now is to accumulate a huge collection of statistics on attendence and win-loss records on baseball and football teams. I feel these two sports are the most popular in America and therefor will contribute the most accurate data I can look into. I plan on discovering which teams have the most loyal fans and which cities have the most loyal fans. I can figure out the cities even more accurately when they have both a baseball and a football team, which is really very common. I also plan on proving to people whether fair weathered fans are indeed real, or if it is just personalities of cities or regions. I'll prove how people enjoy being associated with winners, and how those same people hate being associated with losers, and will detach themselves from a bandwagon until it reaches acceptable success once again.

5. Collaborators I don't plan on teaming up with anybody as of now. I feel like I will work best on this project on my own time and doing it my own way as I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to discover by completing this research.

--Tu Ma Spring 2008 (talk) 05:23, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Comments from Ted: I highly recommend that you start simply by improving the current sociology of sport page. We can talk about how to start-- but I would find a good sociology of sport text book and or contact Dr. Henderson in Soc who teaches a soc of sport class. --Htw3 (talk) 02:50, 22 May 2008 (UTC)