Helping Give Away Psychological Science/Helpful resources for themes in Squid Game/Making of These Pages

Overview
This page recounts the story of how this project came to be, and then unfolded over the course of a little over a year. The core idea is to use popular culture as a way of sharing information about psychological science and mental health resources with a larger audience. HGAPS had done that before, with Netflix series as the focus, such as 13 Reasons Why, and To the Bone. The inspiration here was to to try apply the lessons learned from earlier projects to build resources that could reach new audiences. The stretch goal was to try to also engage stakeholders in South Korea, where the Netflix show Squid Game was set. The plan for connecting with people in Korea relied on a combination of leveraging personal connections of some HGAPS members, as well as directly reaching out to the Wiki editing community in Korea.

The project went through a lot of changes. Working with an all volunteer team involves a lot of shifts in members and roles as other priorities, commitments, and events move to the forefront. The goal of having two groups connected to the project on opposite sides of the globe (the time difference between Korea and the Eastern Standard Time zone, where many of the key volunteers in the USA worked) was +13 hours, making synchronous edit-a-thons extremely challenging. English and Korean are different languages, with different alphabets. There were surprising setbacks and "curve balls" (a baseball metaphor seems apropos, given the popularity of baseball in both countries!).

In the end, the project built a resource page that is one of the largest HGAPS has done yet, and with several new (to HGAPS) technical innovations. We also learned a wealth of practical information about how to achieve this type of project, laying a groundwork for more international collaboration. The Netflix series was nominated for a large number of Emmys, and earned several. They are filming season 2. When it releases, that will be an opportunity to update these pages and to catch the second wave in popular culture, using social media to share the resources with more people. The lessons learned also will pay dividends with other HGAPS projects. And every person who visits the pages will have their expectations of what Wiki is for, and what it can do, stretched and changed.

Read on to learn more about how the adventure played out, and some of the things that we learned as we improvised and adjusted along the way.

Fall 2021-Spring 2022
After watching the popular drama series Squid Game and recognizing the mental health issues it brought to light, HGAPS member Hannah Kim wrote a proposal for a project that would make mental health resources more accessible to the public. Following Hannah’s graduation, Morgan Ciochina at HGAPS created a list of 40 triggering topics that were touched on in the series, including themes such as trauma, loss, and financial concerns.

The project’s team of students at UNC Chapel Hill compiled online mental health resources for these issues, doing multiple rounds of quality checks to make sure the resources were helpful and completely free of charge. They collected different types of resources to provide options depending on what the site’s visitor might be looking for, including helpline phone numbers, assistance program websites, and general information pages. The team also wrote short summaries and descriptions of the information that the material provided so that the user would be able to most easily find a resource that could meet their needs.

Summer 2022 (Korea University)
HGAPS held its first edit-a-thon in Korea, led by UNC’s Dr. Eric Youngstrom and engaging 14 participants, which included 11 new editors. This team consisted of students studying abroad at Korea University, Korean psychologists, and interns at an NGO based in Seoul called PSCORE. Participants in this edit-a-thon came from many different places, including United States of America, South Korea, and Hungary.

The participants gathered more resources and began assembling the Wikipedia page. A few Korean-speaking students collaborated with the Korean psychologists to add information to the Squid Game page in Korean (Hangul); other participants edited the English site while others uploaded media. Since the majority of participants had not edited Wiki pages before, skills the attendees learned during the edit-a-thon include:


 * Editing a Wikipedia page
 * Formatting tables on the site
 * Uploading media to Wiki Commons

was a classroom furnished with stadium-style seating, a computer, LCD projector, whiteboards, chalkboards, and strong WiFi. Despite starting the permissions process several days earlier, we did not have guest access for the WiFi for our volunteers who did not already have a Korea University affiliation, so we improvised by using a hotspot and organizing small groups so that those who had WiFi access could implement the edits.



Fall 2022
Upon Morgan’s graduation, three HGAPS students at UNC took on the Squid Game project: Phoebe Rodda, Noreen Xu, and Grace Chow. They worked on organizing and uploading all of the resources compiled from 2021-2022 and from Korea onto the mental health resources Wikipedia page. Due to the large amount of information, the main task was to figure out how to make the page as user-friendly and easy-to-read as possible; other HGAPS members helped with the code to accomplish this, creating collapsible tables and hyperlinks for ease of access.

In November, the Squid Game project team hosted a hybrid edit-a-thon, with an option to join in-person at UNC or via Zoom. Here, other members of HGAPS who were not on the Squid Game team reviewed the resources to check their validity and to ensure that the page was free of errors. Later, a guide was created to show if a link was .gov, .org, .net, .Wiki, or .com, further contributing to the user-friendliness and trustworthiness of the Wikipedia page.

In December 2022, the team wrapped up the final touches on the Squid Game resources Wikipedia page, prepared for public access.