Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 13:08, Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankarya...@gmail.comwrote: *This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want kids, who will mess up by drawing mangoes and bananas here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly.* * * *- *First of all stop playing those policy games, before looking at [[WP:COMPETENCE]] I would rather say to have a look at [[WP:DONTBITE]]. BITE is suppressing one on the wiki when someone is trying to contribute. Here he is citing the policy for an analysis of a project not mentioning any one in particular, certainly this is NOT BITING. *But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a campus ambassador with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?. * * * - Dude you are getting personal here, I respect you obsession with numbers but the whole idea of a campus ambassador is to help others to edit, instead of writing articles for edit count. You just took one number and creating all the fuss but you ignored others like ... Total Edits :705 (in last 5 months) Article49 7.09% Talk 6 0.87% *User 185 26.77%* *User talk 238 34.44%* *Wikipedia 144 20.84%* Wikipedia talk 26 3.76% Template 37 5.35% Help 6 0.87% For more stats : http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Ramshankaryadavlang=enwiki=wikipedia He brought up numbers since you called him misfit (trolls happen only when people feed from both sides). One must consider the fact that he was a OA in PPP (Remember OA for PPP was selected after following careful process) and unlike IEP (where people are blaming the selection of OA as well [1]). While I greatly appreciate what you and other CA's did doing physical outreach and reaching out to students, but you could have 1000x better if you had better edit count. They are not mere stats which people boast, they are experience. Being an ambassador is about helping out yes, but not just motivating, helping on wiki syntax. The experience allows to share better insight on policies, rules of the game. I am not particularly blaming you, probably design of IEP (or even PPP if PPP also followed the same model of immature CA). I , along with several editors(Even Ashwin raised the same point on the thread) had a problem with this too and is still not being acknowledged even after the results. All we are asking CA's is to Practice before you preach. Is that wrong? In my view scale and quality of students were a bigger problems and got multiplied, but that doesn't mean everything else was right in place. We will learn only if we acknowledge all the proper reasons. There is no need of finger pointing, we need to learn the lessons and the first step would be to acknowledge. Apart from the numbers we got the experience of personally touching 1000+ students and interacting with Faculty and Directors, which you can not do by siting and editing Wikipedia in your living room. I'm not a 14000+ editor like you but I share the same philosophy of free knowledge, but instead of respecting us you are doing all the mud throwing, it's not acceptable at all!! I had already given the credit you guys deserved above, You dont know what he has done beyond the 14000+ edits, so please refrain from commenting on others ability to do things without knowing what they have done. I particularly find it sad when people run over and mail when there are percieved personal attacks on newbies but many keep quiet when senior members are told misfit, 'questioning siting and editing Wikipedia in your living room ' [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Online_Ambassadors_to_be_checked -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Hey all, Let me introduce myself first. I too am a CA in fact a second gen one. I initially decided not to reply to this mail stream at all as there is nothing but a blame game going on. But after all the personal attacks, I've decided to be on the front-line along with my CA family. Ok, firstly, I don't really get this issue of the Indian Community not being aware. I mean, yes, you can blame Hisham for not enrolling the community but as the copyvios started flooding and the students started editing, we hardly saw anyone from the Indian Community. Even the Global community was unaware, but they sought out the information and made their presence felt such that they demanded information. The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I remember attending the meeting last month. I was very excited as I was new to Wikipedia India community, Pune chapter. But am sorry to say, saying that the meeting was fruitful would be nothing but a vast exaggeration. I mean, we explained to the community as to how we and our Indian culture and education system were suffering personal attacks and we really needed assistance in replying back to them, but all the community was interested in was going to the students why they should not do copyvio which, we had already given tons of sessions for. In fact, the mere suggestion of Ram to create custom welcome templates for the students was only agreed upon in theory and never came to life. Unfortunately, attacking the CA's on their edit count is a way, in which you can belittle their efforts, blame it on everyone else and just show how right you are. The very aspect as to how this whole discussion is turning into only a blame game shows the fragmentation of the Indian community to which I feel to be a part of also. As for OA's, I'm sorry but I can speak for myself to state I received zero help from my assigned OA's. I tried a lot on my part to reach out and get help but I had to man 100+ students * 2 subjects all on my own as my fellow CA also left my side. The active CA's were a big support, like Ram and a few others. What is not visible in Wikipedia is the amount of hard work we CA's put in physically. I spent time every day teaching 100 students individually how to create a sandbox, my edit count does not show that contribution, I am sorry to say. I spent day and night searching for copyvios. Its only because of us CA's that the extent of copyvios was scaled to a lesser extent before the emergency OA's came in. As for that Brazilian CA, he has been there since 2007, so I don't really get how you can compare him to Ram. The funniest thing however that I find is the name of the email chain, death and post mortem?? I mean, firstly, the IEP is not dead. Being the CA of SSE, I can say for certain, it was successfully implemented in SSE. I'd say at least 20 students are now permanent Wikipedians who might have done copyvio, but rectified and came back strong. I hate this blame game of Nitika and Hisham as well as the other CA's. I am sorry to say, I had no help from the Indian community. All that I know about detecting copyvio was taught to me by Kudpung and Moonriddengirl, the rest I learnt along the way. Kudpung too was not expected to teach me, but he still did, and that is what I call as the true spirit of a Wikipedian, imparting knowledge. Having a huge number of edits may make you well known to the community at large but for a bunch of students who have just started and don't even know how to check an edit count, its useless knowledge to them. They will hardly reach out to OA's. Most of the queries I got were not on my talk page but via phone calls and in person chat. I carried my laptop around showing anyone and everyone who wanted to know what to do. We accept the mistakes we made but this blame game has to stop. What is the point of it all?? Form a constructive platform in moving forward not step back and say, I told you so. That's just childish and immature. As for the rampant voices who judge our experience, I welcome you to come to the colleges, deal with over 1000+ students and see how your words can totally inspire them to create non-copyright articles. Please, it will be a learning experience for me. Ask Srikeit, I invited him once, only about 16 people attended. The rest 80+ in SSE, asked me face to face at a later time. Would any of you be willing to spend so much time answering their queries from 9am to 2am?? I'd love to get that kind of support and give the students a few of your numbers. Calculate that into my edit count please and am sure, I won't fair that badly. -- Regards, Debanjan* user:debastein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Debastein - Lets make this world a better and more informative place* On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 9:59 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 13:08, Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote: *This is exactly the
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
+1 Debanjan! On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:11 PM, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay debast...@gmail.com wrote: Hey all, Let me introduce myself first. I too am a CA in fact a second gen one. I initially decided not to reply to this mail stream at all as there is nothing but a blame game going on. But after all the personal attacks, I've decided to be on the front-line along with my CA family. Ok, firstly, I don't really get this issue of the Indian Community not being aware. I mean, yes, you can blame Hisham for not enrolling the community but as the copyvios started flooding and the students started editing, we hardly saw anyone from the Indian Community. Even the Global community was unaware, but they sought out the information and made their presence felt such that they demanded information. The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I remember attending the meeting last month. I was very excited as I was new to Wikipedia India community, Pune chapter. But am sorry to say, saying that the meeting was fruitful would be nothing but a vast exaggeration. I mean, we explained to the community as to how we and our Indian culture and education system were suffering personal attacks and we really needed assistance in replying back to them, but all the community was interested in was going to the students why they should not do copyvio which, we had already given tons of sessions for. In fact, the mere suggestion of Ram to create custom welcome templates for the students was only agreed upon in theory and never came to life. Unfortunately, attacking the CA's on their edit count is a way, in which you can belittle their efforts, blame it on everyone else and just show how right you are. The very aspect as to how this whole discussion is turning into only a blame game shows the fragmentation of the Indian community to which I feel to be a part of also. As for OA's, I'm sorry but I can speak for myself to state I received zero help from my assigned OA's. I tried a lot on my part to reach out and get help but I had to man 100+ students * 2 subjects all on my own as my fellow CA also left my side. The active CA's were a big support, like Ram and a few others. What is not visible in Wikipedia is the amount of hard work we CA's put in physically. I spent time every day teaching 100 students individually how to create a sandbox, my edit count does not show that contribution, I am sorry to say. I spent day and night searching for copyvios. Its only because of us CA's that the extent of copyvios was scaled to a lesser extent before the emergency OA's came in. As for that Brazilian CA, he has been there since 2007, so I don't really get how you can compare him to Ram. The funniest thing however that I find is the name of the email chain, death and post mortem?? I mean, firstly, the IEP is not dead. Being the CA of SSE, I can say for certain, it was successfully implemented in SSE. I'd say at least 20 students are now permanent Wikipedians who might have done copyvio, but rectified and came back strong. I hate this blame game of Nitika and Hisham as well as the other CA's. I am sorry to say, I had no help from the Indian community. All that I know about detecting copyvio was taught to me by Kudpung and Moonriddengirl, the rest I learnt along the way. Kudpung too was not expected to teach me, but he still did, and that is what I call as the true spirit of a Wikipedian, imparting knowledge. Having a huge number of edits may make you well known to the community at large but for a bunch of students who have just started and don't even know how to check an edit count, its useless knowledge to them. They will hardly reach out to OA's. Most of the queries I got were not on my talk page but via phone calls and in person chat. I carried my laptop around showing anyone and everyone who wanted to know what to do. We accept the mistakes we made but this blame game has to stop. What is the point of it all?? Form a constructive platform in moving forward not step back and say, I told you so. That's just childish and immature. As for the rampant voices who judge our experience, I welcome you to come to the colleges, deal with over 1000+ students and see how your words can totally inspire them to create non-copyright articles. Please, it will be a learning experience for me. Ask Srikeit, I invited him once, only about 16 people attended. The rest 80+ in SSE, asked me face to face at a later time. Would any of you be willing to spend so much time answering their queries from 9am to 2am?? I'd love to get that kind of support and give the students a few of your numbers. Calculate that into my edit count please and am sure, I won't fair that badly. -- Regards, Debanjan* user:debastein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Debastein - Lets make this world a better and more informative place* On Tue, Nov
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 23:11, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay debast...@gmail.comwrote: The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I never got an answer for the question Does your college profs come to your home and help you in doing the assignments?. I wont blame any single person, to stereotype this is exactly Indian students' mentality and this is a very big problem. It is very difficult to do anything at all even if we have 1000 global admins willing to sign up as ambassadors. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Hey Srikanth, This is exactly what I meant about constructive approach. No my profs don't come to me house. They fail me. I understand that this is a problem in the mentality of Indian students. But you either have two options, decide to help anyway or crib about how the mentality of students need to change. Now let me ask you a question. When someone falls in a river, do you wait for that person to ask you for your help or do you try to save him anyway. I might be immature in my views, but when you have a whole bunch of new Wikipedian's who would prefer to contact their CA's on facebook and not on Wikipedia talk page, do you refuse to give them help or go to their talk pages and help them out. I say, everyone has their choices, I'd jump in the river to save the person, you may want to sit and wait till he calls for your help. There are no good or bad choices, its just a choice and its up to you as to what you believe in. May I also point the rhetoric of your statement, my prof doesn't come to my house, I go to him, because I am afraid of him failing me? So do you want the students to reach the OA's out of fear? In my experience, when I went and helped out a person, even when they didn't want my help, it turned out that I became more easily approachable and they came to me later with more issues. I'd say, this is India, our problems are unique and hence so should be our solutions. Cribbing will get us nowhere. I can say for sure, if you go to 100 students and check out their contribs, at least 20 will reply back and thank you and ask for your help the next time. But if you sit and wait for them to come to you, I don't imagine even 5 will come to you. My views, not necessary that you may agree. Do assume good faith while reading my email, I meant it in no other way. -- Regards, Debanjan* - Lets make this world a better and more informative place* On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 23:11, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay debast...@gmail.com wrote: The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I never got an answer for the question Does your college profs come to your home and help you in doing the assignments?. I wont blame any single person, to stereotype this is exactly Indian students' mentality and this is a very big problem. It is very difficult to do anything at all even if we have 1000 global admins willing to sign up as ambassadors. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Srikanth With all respect, let me ask, what are we trying to do here. To change the so called Indian Students mentality or trying to spur the growth of Wikipedia in India? This is getting too personal and creating a wedge between one of the most well known knowledge communities in the world. Please please please, let us put a stop to this. This conversation/thread has to STOP at any cost. This is not doing any good than getting things personal. I hope better sense prevail. Abhi On 16-Nov-2011 12:15 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote: On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 23:11, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay debast...@gmail.com mailto:debast...@gmail.com wrote: The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I never got an answer for the question Does your college profs come to your home and help you in doing the assignments?. I wont blame any single person, to stereotype this is exactly Indian students' mentality and this is a very big problem. It is very difficult to do anything at all even if we have 1000 global admins willing to sign up as ambassadors. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
+1 Abhilash On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Abhilash abhilashu...@gmail.com wrote: Srikanth With all respect, let me ask, what are we trying to do here. To change the so called Indian Students mentality or trying to spur the growth of Wikipedia in India? This is getting too personal and creating a wedge between one of the most well known knowledge communities in the world. Please please please, let us put a stop to this. This conversation/thread has to STOP at any cost. This is not doing any good than getting things personal. I hope better sense prevail. Abhi On 16-Nov-2011 12:15 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote: On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 23:11, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay debast...@gmail.com wrote: The Indian community however, still expects that students will come to them for help and they shall help. I never got an answer for the question Does your college profs come to your home and help you in doing the assignments?. I wont blame any single person, to stereotype this is exactly Indian students' mentality and this is a very big problem. It is very difficult to do anything at all even if we have 1000 global admins willing to sign up as ambassadors. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing listwikimediaindi...@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- Regards, Debanjan* - Lets make this world a better and more informative place* ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On 13-Nov-2011, at 4:07 PM, Bishakha Datta wrote: I'm hoping we'll hear more about the successes of the project, and eventually come to a balanced understanding of what worked and what didn't. At this stage, we're hearing much more about what didn't work, so it's hard to assess the pilot meaningfully. Thanks for bringing this up Bishakha. I do agree with you - like any other thing IEP has had its own set of highs and lows, ups and downs, failures and successes. I wanted to provide a more holistic view and share some analysis that I have done about IEP to see what worked during the pilot and what did not. Successes Our brilliant army of Campus Ambassadors who have voluntarily put in extra hours of work than they'd been asked to when they'd applied for Campus Ambassador Program. Several in-class sessions, copyvio sessions, co-ordinating with faculty, actively going from student to student and solving their queries, organizing regular CA meet ups/faculty meet ups, going through articles students have written, helping students understand how to do praphrasing and the list goes on and on. No matter what the circumstances were and no matter how busy they were there were always couple of CAs who would actively volunteer for the work that was required to be done. They have put their heart and soul in the program and would like to thank each one of them for all their efforts and dedication towards the program! A lot of students who have been actively editing additional articles 'besides the ones on which they'll be graded'. These students are genuinely interested in Wiki editing and have written some very good articles. Just to add, these students understand the consequences of plagiarism and who knows, these newbies might turn into long term wikipedians. I would also like to share with you all some of the good articles that students have written. I feel in the midst of all the copyvio chaos we have not congratulated students who have done brilliant work on wikipedia: Challenges of Inflationary Policy In India Private_sector_banks_in_India Innovations_in_the_Indian_banking_system Credit_Control Commercial_paper_in_India Indian_money_market Risk_management_in_Indian_banks Monetary_policy_of_India Loan waiver All_India_Financial_Institutions Non-banking_Financial_Company economic_survey Public_Private_Partnership_in_India Public_float Finance_in_India Foreign_Exchange_Management_Act Public_sector_banks_in_India Robinson Crusoe Economy Human Capital Land acquisition in India Partial equilibrium Labour Discrimination Testing high-performance computing applications Test Data Generation Testing in data mining applications Applications of Stack Double-ended priority queue Constructor(Object-oriented programming) These are just few of the articles. And as you'll notice not only have these students written good articles they have also contributed in great way by adding Indian content on wiki. Failures (and while pointing out the failures, I'd also like to address some concerns raised by specific people in this mail trail) There is no denying that our lack of communication with the global wikipedia community would be the biggest failure. Initially when we had approached the OAs we'd thought that their role will be similar (if not the same) to the OAs involved in PPI. But because of several other issues (students adding plagiarized material, low quality content etc) we had to start with the clean up project and hence the role of OAs also changed. I think this change of role caused some confusion for the OAs. So Bala/ Surya, I note your point here going forward we have to have more effective communication with the OAs and the entire OA Program should be designed and monitored in a better fashion. Accepting some of the inexperienced Wikipedians to become OAs. However we recognized our mistake well in time and got more experienced wikipedians as OAs ( OAs who were actively involved in PPI). As Swaroop/Arnav rightly said, we'll have to branch out to other subject streams. It was really difficult for first year engineering students (who were still studying the basics of engineering) to pick up topics on which they could write wikipedia articles because most of those articles were very well covered. Not briefing students about plagiarism and copyvios during the initial in-class sessions. Going forward, we have to make sure that students are taught about this topic in detail. Arnav, Arjun, Swaroop et all - I agree with you! IEP is not dead. The program faced its own set of challenges and we've learnt a lot out of this pilot. We're still studying the trends, our mistakes, our successes and we'll share our evaluation with you all sometime soon. Thanks Nitika___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 09:13, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote: *On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:* *I would also request people not to fork any more new threads on this with same thoughts, * CAMPUS AMBASSADOR SETBACK - The Local Community Viewpoint Ashwin, I respect you views, know the amount of interest and time you had put on the program, but have wide differences. The common thing between your viewpoint and Hisham's is both of you take out bulk of the blame from students, shield them. The difference being Hisham cites culture,host of other things, you point towards management. I will cite only 2 reasons, Scale Quality of students. IMO, nothing else could have helped significantly get a different outcome than this. After the training, Ashwin wrote a note of dissent on the talk page of the CAs at the time: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/India_Campus_Program_Reports Agree with you on this, Infact i raised on the other thread, Hisham still maintains CA's doesnt need to know enough of Wikipedia to teach others. If it happened in PPP too, its still a wrong way I would say. May be the US students were more mature that even with peer level (in terms of wiki exp) ambassadors, they did a decent job. Indian students are not that mature probably. * Need for a project management approach, with deliverables, stages, identification of scaling resources, check-backs, etc was emphasised. * Attitudes of local college managements and how to function in Pune academic environment were given. * Intricacies of academic systems in the colleges, universities in Pune were explained. * Cultural differences between colleges, their goals and priorities, as well as their mutual relations were told. All the above are overrated and irrespective of either way, the outcome would not have been much different. Tell me do WikiProjects use project management etc ? Project management is waste of time in these type of projects where there are a lot of other main things to worry. * We asked an important question - what is the take home for the stake holders? There were adequate take-homes for the CA (a certificate, a T shirt, learning experiences. opportunities in Wikiworld, recognition and some marks for the exam). The participating students were only getting wiki-knowledge and assignment marks. Was that enough to motivate them? There was no formal training for the actual editors. Huh, Do you think CA did better job FOR the extra T-shirt and for other students, T-Shirts would have made a difference. Come on, please dont go to down to this level, AGF that like you and me, they too wanted to volunteer(at least many of them, some might have been forced in the 800 number). Scale was the problem for lack of enough training the quality of students you get at that scale and it was acknowledged. * Most important of all, what is there in return to the stake holders like colleges? This question is still unanswered. There has to be something for all the stakeholders (CAs, students, college teachers, college management, community, IEP program team) in the program. Right now, only Wikipedia is the ultimate beneficiary. and partly CAs and some students. For a win-win situation, everybody must have something reasonable for take-home. Well, infact colleges got very nice publicity. Its ideally the colleges that won without doing much(may be just entertained Hisham and Co and gave them few hours). Even CA's / students' tried contributing and failed for some reason. So colleges won, Wikipedia lost. Reality IMO. * We repeatedly emphasised the need for the staff person to be recruited from Pune and function from Pune 24x7, who should preferably be Maharashtrian, and having local contacts, rather than be from Delhi, stationed there and fly in here for a few days a week (as we were told it would be). Would have made no big difference,seriously. If in one class visit they dont get the message Do not copy after numerous warnings online, how would they get it had one person physically being present. Maharashtrian and Local contacts Ah? are we doing some cinema shooting / driving around the city? I thought it was about Wikipedia editing. * The need for rigorous training of campus ambassadors and formal training for student editors. The community felt that it was not quite being listened to. Slowly contact with Hisham dwindled. We never came to know except through grape-vine when Hisham was in town. It appeared to us that the community mattered no more and the IEP (India Education Project) was the whole-soul focus. Our contact with local CAs was not encouraged. When a request was made for at least one Pune community member to be on the CA mailing list so that we could be in the loop and available for ready support and advice, it was not agreed. I suppose most of the students got online with
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Hi Nitika All the consideration aside for the Brilliant army. I clicked on a couple of articles on your list, and then found an interesting pattern. Did you check any of these yourself? In case you didn't, I updated the list for you. Most of the articles that don't have a comment in the list below are not sufficiently reviewed by other editors, very few received extensive copy editing for style and cohesiveness by regular editors, most still didn't. Most of them seem to be poorly written or formatted, a lot of these will be tagged several times for a multitude of issues, this is far from efficient, but I suppose their effort counts, only if these were created without a requirement to fill some course criteria. To which my question, what was the intent of the program again? This would have been the eventual outcome if 10 students voluntarily participated in a workshop and did those in their free time. As for the highs and lows, ups and downs, failures and successes, allow us to decide on the holistic view. I don't think someone involved in a project can have a holistic view, things like observer bias and subject-expectancy effect might interfere. As for starting Wiki editing you might want to start yourself. I suggest your userpage on Meta, which if I recall I told you to create a month ago. Regards Theo On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Nitika ntan...@wikimedia.org wrote: Challenges of Inflationary Policy In Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenges_of_Inflationary_Policy_In_India - Wrong article - Redirects to [[Inflation in India]] Private_sector_banks_in_Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_banks_in_India Innovations_in_the_Indian_banking_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovations_in_the_Indian_banking_system - Entire article was merged to [[Banking in India]] as a section. Credit_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Control Commercial_paper_in_Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_paper_in_India Indian_money_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_money_market - Redirects to [[Money market in India]] Risk_management_in_Indian_bankshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_management_in_Indian_banks Monetary_policy_of_Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy_of_India Loan waiver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loan_waiver All_India_Financial_Institutionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_India_Financial_Institutions Non-banking_Financial_Companyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mallika.sharma/Non-banking_Financial_Company -Article rejected in AFC for being not-reliable. economic_surveyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raj2026/economic_survey -Article still in AFC- needs a re-write. Public_Private_Partnership_in_Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Private_Partnership_in_India -Tagged as orphan, and needing copy edit. Public_float http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float -This one is from 2008 Finance_in_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance_in_India -Article from 2009 Foreign_Exchange_Management_Acthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Exchange_Management_Act -Article from 2006 Public_sector_banks_in_Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sector_banks_in_India http://goog_1646918697/ Robinson Crusoe Economyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe_Economy -Another redirect, 'economy' is in lower-case. Human Capital http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Capital -Article from 2002 Land acquisition in Indiahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_acquisition_in_India -Currently tagged for neutrality, tone, cleanup, citation, copy editing and disputed accuracy. Partial equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_equilibrium -Reverted thrice for copyvio, not sure if the current version is sufficiently verified. Labour Discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Discrimination Testing high-performance computing applicationshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_high-performance_computing_applications Test Data Generation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Data_Generation Testing in data mining applicationshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_in_data_mining_applications Applications of Stackhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_%28data_structure%29#Applications -Redirect, Moved to a section Stack (abstract data type) Double-ended priority queuehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-ended_priority_queue Constructor(Object-oriented programming)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_%28object-oriented_programming%29 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
I respect Srikanth's thinking but agree to disagree. In times of crisis, when things are pulling every which way, formal planning methodologies can get you going. I actually sat on a hillside at 13,500 feet in Kargil in 1999 with paper and pencil to make sense of construction schedules when the fury was on all around (I used CPM). Our years of experience have taught us that informal methods are great to get the ball rolling but crumble in the long run. Using methodologies is one effective way to reduce risk of failure. You will have to take that as a given, I will not argue about that belief with you. Anyway, like I said, it may have changed the outcome. But our lesson was different - communities must be engaged, because the community possessed the wherewithal to give advice which could have averted/reduced/resolved this issue. We are/were reasonably clued up about referencing, POV, citation, paraphrasing. Srikanth, all the skills we mentioned figured in one way or the other in the overall project planning/activities. We were not specifically cribbing about the copyvio thing. Please understand the story in its context. Everywhere, it is being said, that the global community needed to be engaged, surprise, surprise, the local community needed to be engaged too. I take the point about CAs finding volunteering as a worthy activity very well. Thanks for reminding us. The two wiki-academies were for teachers of the institution besides some others. Prof Radha Mishra can give those details. I beg to differ with you. The blame cant be A or B. It must be A and B, each for different things. Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 09:13, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote: *On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:* *I would also request people not to fork any more new threads on this with same thoughts, * CAMPUS AMBASSADOR SETBACK - The Local Community Viewpoint Ashwin, I respect you views, know the amount of interest and time you had put on the program, but have wide differences. The common thing between your viewpoint and Hisham's is both of you take out bulk of the blame from students, shield them. The difference being Hisham cites culture,host of other things, you point towards management. I will cite only 2 reasons, Scale Quality of students. IMO, nothing else could have helped significantly get a different outcome than this. After the training, Ashwin wrote a note of dissent on the talk page of the CAs at the time: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/India_Campus_Program_Reports Agree with you on this, Infact i raised on the other thread, Hisham still maintains CA's doesnt need to know enough of Wikipedia to teach others. If it happened in PPP too, its still a wrong way I would say. May be the US students were more mature that even with peer level (in terms of wiki exp) ambassadors, they did a decent job. Indian students are not that mature probably. * Need for a project management approach, with deliverables, stages, identification of scaling resources, check-backs, etc was emphasised. * Attitudes of local college managements and how to function in Pune academic environment were given. * Intricacies of academic systems in the colleges, universities in Pune were explained. * Cultural differences between colleges, their goals and priorities, as well as their mutual relations were told. All the above are overrated and irrespective of either way, the outcome would not have been much different. Tell me do WikiProjects use project management etc ? Project management is waste of time in these type of projects where there are a lot of other main things to worry. * We asked an important question - what is the take home for the stake holders? There were adequate take-homes for the CA (a certificate, a T shirt, learning experiences. opportunities in Wikiworld, recognition and some marks for the exam). The participating students were only getting wiki-knowledge and assignment marks. Was that enough to motivate them? There was no formal training for the actual editors. Huh, Do you think CA did better job FOR the extra T-shirt and for other students, T-Shirts would have made a difference. Come on, please dont go to down to this level, AGF that like you and me, they too wanted to volunteer(at least many of them, some might have been forced in the 800 number). Scale was the problem for lack of enough training the quality of students you get at that scale and it was acknowledged. * Most important of all, what is there in return to the stake holders like colleges? This question is still unanswered. There has to be something for all the stakeholders (CAs, students, college teachers, college management, community,
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 20:15, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Nitika ntan...@wikimedia.org wrote: I would also like to share with you all some of the good articles that students have written. Nitika, please use right terms from next time, Good articles mean entirely different thing in Wikipedia. http://enwp.org/WP:GA Robinson Crusoe Economyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe_Economy -Another redirect, 'economy' is in lower-case. Theo, You got it wrong on that alone to best of my knowledge, probably you did it too fast. Its probably the lone GA which got churned out of the program and we could call it a lone success among several other things. Wish that editor continues wiki editing. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers Thank you. Best, Gautam http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
With all due respect Bishakha, I beg to differ. On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: As for the highs and lows, ups and downs, failures and successes, allow us to decide on the holistic view. I don't think someone involved in a project can have a holistic view, things like observer bias and subject-expectancy effect might interfere. Who's us, Theo? And surely those involved in the project are allowed to have - and share - their own views, regardless of whether or not others agree with them? They are, my comment was only to her point about a holistic view. 'Us' apparently means the community, the rest of the people viewing and commenting here. I didn't object to her sharing her view, it was calling it holistic that I was commenting on. As for starting Wiki editing you might want to start yourself. I suggest your userpage on Meta, which if I recall I told you to create a month ago. Ooooh! Can we please cut out these sort of unconstructive, personal comments. They don't help anyone or anything. I assure you this was not a personal comment. You might want to look at the Meta talk page for IEP here [1] where admins who first dealt with the issue played a game charades to find out who was actually in-charge of IEP. It has editors from enwp, trying to deduce who Nitika.t is Here's a couple of quotes- from User:Nitika.thttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nitika.t's October 6th comment at en:Wikipedia talk:India Education Programhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program we assume that she holds some position in the project, but she never states what it is and And er... that's it. From what I've been able to gather on my own: She eventually identified herself but only on that page. Her userpage on Meta, is a single dot added by me[2] so it wouldn't be a red-link to new editors from enwp, and she can confirm that I did indeed tell her to create a userpage on Meta in person a month ago in the office. Regards Theo [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Transparency_about_who.27s_in_charge_of_what [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nitika.toldid=2960704 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: As for starting Wiki editing you might want to start yourself. I suggest your userpage on Meta, which if I recall I told you to create a month ago. Ooooh! Can we please cut out these sort of unconstructive, personal comments. They don't help anyone or anything. I assure you this was not a personal comment. You might want to look at the Meta talk page for IEP here [1] where admins who first dealt with the issue played a game charades to find out who was actually in-charge of IEP. It has editors from enwp, trying to deduce who Nitika.t is And with all due respect back, Theo, this thread is about the IEP - not about Nitika's editing prowess. So your comment strikes me as irrelevant - and I'm sorry, but even if I'm in a minority of one, it did come across as personal to me. I also feel that comments like these have a strong effect on those whom they name thus - they silence them. Specially when they are relatively new to this culture, and even more so, when they are participating in a very difficult and somewhat hostile thread. And they silence others who may have spoken out. So while applauding Nitika for sharing her views in this space, I also want to urge that you and I not get into a slanging match on this point. Let's agree to disagree, since I doubt we will agree on this. At the same time, I very much appreciate your efforts to help and nurture Nitika, which did come through in the earlier email too. Best Bishakha [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Transparency_about_who.27s_in_charge_of_what [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nitika.toldid=2960704 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:33 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: As for starting Wiki editing you might want to start yourself. I suggest your userpage on Meta, which if I recall I told you to create a month ago. Ooooh! Can we please cut out these sort of unconstructive, personal comments. They don't help anyone or anything. I assure you this was not a personal comment. You might want to look at the Meta talk page for IEP here [1] where admins who first dealt with the issue played a game charades to find out who was actually in-charge of IEP. It has editors from enwp, trying to deduce who Nitika.t is And with all due respect back, Theo, this thread is about the IEP - not about Nitika's editing prowess. So your comment strikes me as irrelevant - and I'm sorry, but even if I'm in a minority of one, it did come across as personal to me. I also feel that comments like these have a strong effect on those whom they name thus - they silence them. Specially when they are relatively new to this culture, and even more so, when they are participating in a very difficult and somewhat hostile thread. And they silence others who may have spoken out. So while applauding Nitika for sharing her views in this space, I also want to urge that you and I not get into a slanging match on this point. Let's agree to disagree, since I doubt we will agree on this. At the same time, I very much appreciate your efforts to help and nurture Nitika, which did come through in the earlier email too. Best Bishakha Yes, I agree to disagree on this, but I still fail to see how I made it personal. I try my best to avoid *ad hominem* attacks, it breaches the line of good debate with an argument, but I agree my tone can seem harsh at times, and in hindsight I could have stated my point a bit better. But what you seem to misunderstand as personal is actually her professional work. Please correct me, she is indeed a paid employee/contractor, and part of that job involves editing a wiki, a big part. I fail to see how any criticism or comments about it can be deemed personal. Second, it wasn't her editing prowess, it was something that I already informed her about, twice. Creating a userpage is the first form of identification on a wiki, without it, people have no idea if that user is actually an editor, an employee, or a vandal. As an admin, I thought it was my job to inform her, especially when others were confused about her identity. Besides this, I also don't understand the point about, comments like mine silencing editors. Are you arguing, I should hold her to lesser standards than another editor even when she is a paid staff member in a position of authority? There are new volunteers who join everyday who are new to the culture, I'm all for being nice to them, but she has been in a position of authority, leading the program. Instead of leading by example, people have a hard time identifying her. I didn't think bringing up the issue in context of the same authority and program was personal. I'm sorry if it seemed personal to you, it was not my intent. Again, I do agree that the tone in my original email might have been needlessly harsh, for that, I apologize, but my points still stand. Regards Theo ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
+1 Srikanth! Hey Folks! I'm Ram and I'm one of the CA's worked closely with CoEP and SSE. I would like to share my views on this most discussed topic, coz the term FAIL is quite thought provoking, and now everyone has an opinion and I respect that. As a Campus Ambassador(CA) we faced the heat on ground and nobody can feel the pain like us when we heard the discontinuation of IEP in CoEP coz we gave our personal time physically and virtually in every possible way to make this program a success, and I promise we'll keep doing that. My views on IEP: 1. *Wikipedia India Education Program(IEP) for a CA* : The whole idea of this program like everyone knows is to get more editors, but we have our own set of challenges in the age of Facebook. What a bunch of CAs have done in as short span of 5 months can't be done in a couple of months by existing Community(local or global), coz we touched the students(1000+) personally, we had the experience of interactions with Faculty and Directors. Our only aim was to tell them(students) that Wikipedia is cool, and indeed we did that! in the way we taught wikipedia to them. Few things which we tell our students in our Wiki Sessions: - Writing on Wikipedia will give you global audience, 400 million unique visitors - It will improve your Writing, Critical Thinking and Collaborative skills - It will add a bullet point to your resume and hence better placements - Lastly it will also give you marks if you follow the given deadlines Yes, I agree that we have seen setback coz of the copyvios, but I totally agree with Srikanth coz this was due to the scale and numbers. 2. *Faculty Involvement* : It is one of the weak link in IEP, though they knew the importance of this program, but they have their own set of obligations/mindset, and we always felt that not all the faculty members are tracking the students and their articles. We have some exemplary Profs who are so much involved that they reached every student's talk page and wrote message on it, and on the other side few never opened the course page itself! Lesson for us is to enroll only those who are really interested and track them as well, drop the course if they are not putting effort as required, but this scenario was different 6 months back, coz no one knew about this program, and yes we did enrolled a few inactive faculty coz they showed interest but never lived up to the expectation. 3. *Online Ambassadors* : As Hisham already told that we got very late engagement of our OAs in this program as well as the OA expectation issue, we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story but even you were a part of this sinking ship. 4. *India Community* : We really missed you throughout this program, I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc. We don't bifurcate among community and we never taught our students that only Indian community will help, our aim was to make their collaborative skill better instead of creating a division among the community. For my fellow Indian Wiki Community, folks we would love to hear from you and surely need your help and support in future. 5. *Global Community* : Firstly I would say Thank you to them for teaching the harsh lessons but we really liked the way you guys supported us. Yes, I know few folks who always crib and do the mud throwing on this program and it's implementation, but I know folks who have helped writing great articles, reviewing them and event doing copy-editing and cleaning. We need to surely communicate better with them in future. 6. *Campus Ambassadors*: The best thing that happen to me coz of IEP is I found great friends who share the same philosophy of free knowledge. We gave our personal time not only in taking session but also training new bunch of CAs and helping students in every possible way. We were the face of Wikipedia on campus and we love it! Like Srikanth said yes we were overloaded coz of the number of students per CA was very large still we did our bit to help every students by either reaching out personally and virtually. One point to note here that out of 40 selected CAs(Gen 1 2) only 30 are active and out of those 30 only 20 track/follow and reach out students, so in short we need more involvements for the dormant CAs. 7. *Students* : We found good and bad students, student I know has written a GA and I also know a student who in-spite of several warnings by phone/mail and personal visits they kept copy-paste! Between the two extremes there are folks who failed few times but did learned from it and had become great
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
*we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. * *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story but even you were a part of this sinking ship.* Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up. So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch). ,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc *Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded. And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community. You dont need a specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what to do and what not to do. A student who doesnt listen to Do not copy paste instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the instruction came from an Indian editor. On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote: +1 Srikanth! Hey Folks! I'm Ram and I'm one of the CA's worked closely with CoEP and SSE. I would like to share my views on this most discussed topic, coz the term FAIL is quite thought provoking, and now everyone has an opinion and I respect that. As a Campus Ambassador(CA) we faced the heat on ground and nobody can feel the pain like us when we heard the discontinuation of IEP in CoEP coz we gave our personal time physically and virtually in every possible way to make this program a success, and I promise we'll keep doing that. My views on IEP: 1. *Wikipedia India Education Program(IEP) for a CA* : The whole idea of this program like everyone knows is to get more editors, but we have our own set of challenges in the age of Facebook. What a bunch of CAs have done in as short span of 5 months can't be done in a couple of months by existing Community(local or global), coz we touched the students(1000+) personally, we had the experience of interactions with Faculty and Directors. Our only aim was to tell them(students) that Wikipedia is cool, and indeed we did that! in the way we taught wikipedia to them. Few things which we tell our students in our Wiki Sessions: - Writing on Wikipedia will give you global audience, 400 million unique visitors - It will improve your Writing, Critical Thinking and Collaborative skills - It will add a bullet point to your resume and hence better placements - Lastly it will also give you marks if you follow the given deadlines Yes, I agree that we have seen setback coz of the copyvios, but I totally agree with Srikanth coz this was due to the scale and numbers. 2. *Faculty Involvement* : It is one of the weak link in IEP, though they knew the importance of this program, but they have their own set of obligations/mindset, and we always felt that not all the faculty members are tracking the students and their articles. We have some exemplary Profs who are so much involved that they reached every student's talk page and wrote message on it, and on the other side few never opened the course page itself! Lesson for us is to enroll only those who are really interested and track them as well, drop the course if they are not putting effort as required, but this scenario was different 6 months back, coz no one knew about this program, and yes we did enrolled a few inactive faculty coz they showed interest but never lived up to the expectation. 3. *Online Ambassadors* : As Hisham already told that we got very late engagement of our OAs in this program as well as the
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Hey Guys, I am Wasim, Campus Ambassador at the India Education Program. I have been reading the mails from the wiki lovers about the so called DEATH and POST MORTEM of the India Education Program. It feels terrible to hear such words but on the other hand we are going to accept this and learn from the same. As we all know the program was a pilot program and it is just a BABY, at this stage we all make mistakes. - About the student selection in future I think it is better to keep it optional so that we get more QUALITY instead of QUANTITY. - We want some more participation from the Teachers, so that the articles are checked regularly. - Online Ambassadors need to be more ACTIVE so that the burden on CA's is reduced to some extent. - Planning needs to be done as far as the Article selection is concerned to avoid unnecessary copy paste. Talking about the involvement, it is voluntary and we need to step up and take the responsibility to make it successful. If we just keep complaining about the things like *we had no idea of what to do*, then I don't think the program is going to work with your support. Sometimes you need to lead and take up the challenge, as it is rightly said by someone *RESPONSIBILITY IS ALWAYS TAKEN - NEVER GIVEN.* * * To be honest we have learnt a lot from the program and we are sure to work on the* delta's (Δ) .* Also if you guys can appreciate the fraction of work we have done it would be motivating and in future we would be better than now. We dared to think out of the box and had the courage to stand in front of 1000 students and urged them to write on Wikipedia. There are some things which cannot be experienced by sitting at home. We were present right there to experience the feeling of pride and victory in the student eyes when he was able to write a paragraph on Wikipedia, that really matters in a pilot program. Criticizing Ideas demotivates everyone, and It gives an impression to the participants that their Ideas will get them into trouble. The thing is wackiest ideas are the most creative. *Our greatest glory consist not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. * * * *Thanks Regards,* *Wasim* * * * * ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote: *we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. * *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story but even you were a part of this sinking ship.* Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up. So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch). There it is, even CA's are not expected to keep a check on each and every article, that is not even possible. Instead we were expecting them to come forward and ask us or anyone their questions and queries and doubts. Few did come and few didn't. Now the number of students who didn't come ahead and ask questions was quite high. So Hisham did tell us that you all go and ask students what is the problem they are facing. And then being a CA we tried our best to get in touch with every student to start editing, and later to stop copy pasting. If the students are not coming forward, we were asked to go to them, but the number was quite big. Now if there is a crazy guy, there is a crazy guy we or in fact no one can do anything about it. There were number of instances where few students were repeatedly copy pasting stuff or creating havoc on Wiki. It is not that we didn't warn them or let them do, we wrote on talk pages, mailed them, contacted on facebook, and also got in touch with them physically on ground and explained them and also raised this issue with relevant professors. Some of them understood, and some of them continued disruptions. So there was no way we could control them. And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community. You dont need a specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what to do and what not to do. A student who doesnt listen to Do not copy paste instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the instruction came from an Indian editor. Yes, we didn't want any specific nationality editor. That is what even we are saying, if a student doesn't listen to A administrator, he won't even listen to B admin. But personally even I felt bad when certain Users from abroad questioned the education system and quality of Indian standards, and there was an instance where a User crossed the line and created this Sub Pagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:DexDor/IEP_statusdiff=454936076oldid=454917314 , thus we tried to tackle it also by posting a Messagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DexDor#User:DexDor.2FIEP_status_2 on his talk page too. This is where I think the lack of communication with Indian Community lead us to. And we do accept that there was some serious lack in communication with community, and by community I mean both local and global. One point to note here that out of 40 selected CAs(Gen 1 2) only 30 are active and out of those 30 only 20 track/follow and reach out students, so in short we need more involvements for the dormant CAs. Here. I would like to differ with numbers, still we need involvement of as many CAs as we can. I think the number of CAs doing actual work is still less. We need to improve on this too. -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 23:27, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: *we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. * *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story but even you were a part of this sinking ship.* Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up. So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch). I explicitly mentioned in office hours that it should be students who ought to be reaching out, not the other way. Please tell me does any of your college profs come to your desks/home and see if you write your assignment? It was clearly the students responsibility to reach out for help, and they failed in it. Period. Oct 12 15:34:32 srikanthlogic but i was on IRC, got only one help req in a whole week, my talk page was untouched. I am ready to help if people reach out :) Oct 12 15:35:33 Hmundol srikanthlogic soda bottle : yes, i know that more students ought to be reaching out but sometimes they don't even know the mistake they are committing so don't reach out. …what the Campus Ambassadors have been doing i s proactively going to contrib histories and checking in. …unfortunately, that seems to the only way that it's worked. ,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc * Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded. Poor editing, I raised the flag earlier once in the detailed FAQ page prepared by Spiff[2] which is mentioned above and then first office hours. But then copyvios was the bigger focus, MoS had no time. When students could not get do not copy, I would wonder they would get detailed MoS (which I agree takes little time / proficiency in English, which I doubt I would have had it during my college days) I stopped writing on talk pages of students voluntarily after I got very little response. Unfortunately I had too many other things to do than to write on non-responsive students' talk pages for which I repented at the start of my post in the original thread. [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2011-10-12 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SpacemanSpiff/S3/IEP/FAQ -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Regarding so called death and post-marten I wont be right person to talk about CoEP or SSE, I am assigned to SNDT Women's University,So I will stick to the work and responsibilities assigned to me... it is challenging to engage female editors as we have less women editors. (IEP is still running in SNDT) Instead of following classic approach of going to Classes and teaching them*during lectures *, I preferred to have fun workshops on Sunday's where they come together for 3 hours and do collaborative editing Even before India Education Program, I had conducted Wiki Editing Workshops, and even without marks and prize students from workshops are editing wikipedia regularly. And Whole world edits wiki not to get marks but to learn and to have fun. So for me it was ideal to follow fun workshops for my own assigned IEP class. And current status of my class is - Everyone started editing wikipedia, so we have new women editors who never edited wikipedia before...regarding articles - not great, quality is not good, still need to conduct more workshops to improve quality of their work. Good thing about class is - Class Teacher attends Community Meet-ups and is aware of ongoing activities (sometimes more updated than myself). Another good thins - Workshops are on Sundays in absence of teachers, so they can ask doubts freely. and can have real fun. still I have to work hard to improve quality of articles through workshops, and hope so other classes CA's (SSE and CoEP) find such alternative which is more effective.As of now, CoEP and SSE follows classical *presentations during lectures* method. We will resume workshops after SNDT exams. Will keep updating all of you about progress at SNDT and IEP. Thanks to those who supported :-) Keep Supporting, Keep Inspiring! Best, Abhishek Suryawanshi * * ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Hi Bala, *Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.* - We are not putting blame on anyone. If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience. Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps. *It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch).* - First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid will learn by doing mistakes eventually. *Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.* - Accept my apologies for not able to recall few Indian Admins who tired to help us, but if you see the big picture, the whole scene was dominated by editors from abroad. We needed your help and support when these folks were pointing fingers on Indian Education System. One more thing, after the first few instances of copyvios we reached out in person and took 35+ sessions in various classes but even after putting that effort few of them kept doing the copy-paste for last minute submissions. *And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.* *- *By Indian community I mean people like you and me and others you are either reading or replying this thread, guys we surely needed your support at the forefront. We never denied the fact that we have failed in certain areas but that doesn't mean that overall program is a failure or dead. We believe in learning from our mistakes and happy to do new ones to learn better. Cheers, Ram On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote: *we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. * *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story but even you were a part of this sinking ship.* Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up. So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch). ,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc * Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff quit trying to help.
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
-* If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience. Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps. *I remember doing this exactly on Oct 12 office hours. Here is the transcript snippet which srikanth has provided in the earlier mail. Again you are demonstrating your ignorance about what an OA role is. Oct 12 15:34:32 srikanthlogic but i was on IRC, got only one help req in a whole week, my talk page was untouched. I am ready to help if people reach out :) Oct 12 15:35:33 Hmundol srikanthlogic soda bottle : yes, i know that more students ought to be reaching out but sometimes they don't even know the mistake they are committing so don't reach out. …what the Campus Ambassadors have been doing i s proactively going to contrib histories and checking in. …unfortunately, that seems to the only way that it's worked. *.* - *First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid will learn by doing mistakes eventually. *This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want kids, who will mess up by drawing mangoes and bananas here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly. But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a campus ambassador with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?. This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by campus ambassadors who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students. On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote: We have had a lot of responses and recriminations on this issue. In the light of all that has happened, please let us stop our grousing. Hisham has opened a new thread, and accepted full responsibility. That is the end of the blame-game as far as anybody is concerned. All of us are inviolved and all of us are both innocent and blameworthy, including and especially me. I know I should have done more. Let us bring this thread to a close. Let all posts now be in response to his new thread only and couched in positive terms and offering useful suggestions or fresh input. Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Bala, *Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.* - We are not putting blame on anyone. If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience. Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps. *It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch).* - First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid will learn by doing mistakes eventually. *Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
sorry to disagree Ashwin, This has to be dragged out. These guys are just not getting it. They just dont have the knowledge nor they willingnes to listen to criticism. They are just deflecting criticism by calling [[WP:CIVIL]] and crying personal attack. I am not going to spend time posting in the other thread, when the opening mail preempts any attempt at criticism by citing NPOV and CIVIL. If they are going to run yet another similar program without getting what went wrong in the first place - they are bound to make the same mistakes again. The cost will be borne by the wiki community - us. The paid consultants will move on to other jobs, the campus ambassadors will have another role to put in their resumes- but it is wikipedia and us wikipedians who will pay the price. A pilot program that leaves a gigantic mess requiring three months of clean up effort from hundreds of regular editors needs some honest and harsh criticism. On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote: We have had a lot of responses and recriminations on this issue. In the light of all that has happened, please let us stop our grousing. Hisham has opened a new thread, and accepted full responsibility. That is the end of the blame-game as far as anybody is concerned. All of us are inviolved and all of us are both innocent and blameworthy, including and especially me. I know I should have done more. Let us bring this thread to a close. Let all posts now be in response to his new thread only and couched in positive terms and offering useful suggestions or fresh input. Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Bala, *Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the OA role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.* - We are not putting blame on anyone. If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience. Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps. *It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs - MikeLynch).* - First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid will learn by doing mistakes eventually. *Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.* - Accept my apologies for not able to recall few Indian Admins who tired to help us, but if you see the big picture, the whole scene was dominated by editors from abroad. We needed your help and support when these folks were pointing fingers on Indian Education System. One more thing, after the first few instances of copyvios we reached out in person and took 35+ sessions in various classes but even after putting that effort few of them kept doing the copy-paste for last minute submissions. *And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.* *- *By Indian community I mean people like you and me and others you are either reading or replying this thread, guys we surely needed your support at the forefront. We never denied the fact that we have failed in certain areas but that doesn't mean that overall program is a failure or dead. We believe in learning from our mistakes and happy to do new ones to learn better. Cheers, Ram On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by campus ambassadors who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students. Speaking of playing in sandboxes, just for you, a nice shallow blog post that applies: http://www.smallact.com/blog/3-keys-to-playing-nicely-in-the-social-media-sandbox/ Enjoy the sand, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
*This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want kids, who will mess up by drawing mangoes and bananas here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly.* * * *- *First of all stop playing those policy games, before looking at [[WP:COMPETENCE]] I would rather say to have a look at [[WP:DONTBITE]]. *But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a campus ambassador with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?. * * * - Dude you are getting personal here, I respect you obsession with numbers but the whole idea of a campus ambassador is to help others to edit, instead of writing articles for edit count. You just took one number and creating all the fuss but you ignored others like ... Total Edits :705 (in last 5 months) Article49 7.09% Talk 6 0.87% *User 185 26.77%* *User talk 238 34.44%* *Wikipedia 144 20.84%* Wikipedia talk 26 3.76% Template 37 5.35% Help 6 0.87% For more stats : http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Ramshankaryadavlang=enwiki=wikipedia Apart from the numbers we got the experience of personally touching 1000+ students and interacting with Faculty and Directors, which you can not do by siting and editing Wikipedia in your living room. I'm not a 14000+ editor like you but I share the same philosophy of free knowledge, but instead of respecting us you are doing all the mud throwing, it's not acceptable at all!! *This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by campus ambassadors who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students.* - You are crossing your limits here, we have repeatedly accepted our faults but this is too much, we tried something new things, and few worked few didn't by it doesn't gives you the authority to say whatever you like to! Instead of coming up with How we can make it better you are more into the mode of You did it wrong!. ~Ram On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote: -* If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience. Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps. *I remember doing this exactly on Oct 12 office hours. Here is the transcript snippet which srikanth has provided in the earlier mail. Again you are demonstrating your ignorance about what an OA role is. Oct 12 15:34:32 srikanthlogic but i was on IRC, got only one help req in a whole week, my talk page was untouched. I am ready to help if people reach out :) Oct 12 15:35:33 Hmundol srikanthlogic soda bottle : yes, i know that more students ought to be reaching out but sometimes they don't even know the mistake they are committing so don't reach out. …what the Campus Ambassadors have been doing i s proactively going to contrib histories and checking in. …unfortunately, that seems to the only way that it's worked. *.* - *First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid will learn by doing mistakes eventually. * This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want kids, who will mess up by drawing mangoes and bananas here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly. But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a campus ambassador with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?. This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by campus ambassadors who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students. On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.com wrote: We have had a lot of responses and recriminations on this issue. In the light of all that has happened, please let us stop our grousing. Hisham has opened a new thread, and accepted full responsibility. That is the end of the blame-game as far as anybody is concerned. All of us are inviolved and all of us are both innocent and blameworthy, including and especially me. I know I should have done more. Let us bring this thread to a close.
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
I second you bisakha.. I don't know what went wrong, whether extreme pressure caused the students to take those shortcuts just copy paste or there was some kind of misscommunication. We OAs tried our best to edit the copyvios as far as possible. But things were even worse the CAs who had higher experience of handling them had to interven. Regards, Deepon On 11/13/11, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. This is related to something I've been thinking about. As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and about having fun while learning. In practice, did it remain like that? Going by what I read, it sounded like many of the students were under high stress to turn in these wikipedia assignments to their teachers - and used every possible shortcut in the book. (Exactly what I would have done in my student days). I may be totally off-base on this, but am curious, so would appreciate some info. My question is: if this becomes a high stress exam type situ, is the student likely to a)either see it as fun b)go back to it later for fun? In which case, is this student likely to become a prospective wikipedia editor, or is this student going to treat this as a one-time thing and never want to do this ever again? (Given relationship with stress, exams, teachers, marks)? Also - larger related qs: is the aim of the India Ed program to increase article content on wp (which can be done short-term) or to increase the number of editors? Or both? Cheers, Bishakha -- Sent from my mobile device ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Did you guys try subject/stream specific article adoption? I was just thinking about how an average student who finishes bachelors and masters writes at least 20 essays and research papers that don't get published. They are just graded and forgotten. This means that all students are forced to go through a range of material. Wouldn't it be nice if you asked them to retrieve those and adopt stubs? Just a thought. Also, I'd love to have a copy of a draft/report that lists the entire chronology and conclusion of the program. Warmly Regards Noopur On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.comwrote: On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. This is related to something I've been thinking about. As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and about having fun while learning. In practice, did it remain like that? Going by what I read, it sounded like many of the students were under high stress to turn in these wikipedia assignments to their teachers - and used every possible shortcut in the book. (Exactly what I would have done in my student days). I may be totally off-base on this, but am curious, so would appreciate some info. My question is: if this becomes a high stress exam type situ, is the student likely to a)either see it as fun b)go back to it later for fun? In which case, is this student likely to become a prospective wikipedia editor, or is this student going to treat this as a one-time thing and never want to do this ever again? (Given relationship with stress, exams, teachers, marks)? Also - larger related qs: is the aim of the India Ed program to increase article content on wp (which can be done short-term) or to increase the number of editors? Or both? Cheers, Bishakha ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- Noopur Raval Student Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Ph: 9650567690 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On 13 November 2011 08:46, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. This is related to something I've been thinking about. As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and about having fun while learning. Hi Bishakha, This is a bit of a derail from your e-mail, but I wanted to clarify your use of the past tense (they *were* about contributing). I think the thread title here may be creating some confusion about what has actually happened. That, or else I may be confused myself :-) The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP, the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over: contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't died. A number of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team couldn't get resolved. The plagiarism problems were serious, and after their efforts to fix them didn't work, Hisham and Barry shut down that stream of the project. It was a hard decision to make, but I expect there's general agreement that it was the right decision. But the project itself is not over. Although, the pilot phase might be over: I'm not sure about that. I'm just clarifying this point because I think it would be good for everybody here to have the same basic understanding of what happened. And if I'm wrong, somebody might please just correct me :-) Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Sue, *A number of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team couldn't get resolved.* The project has not been mostly successful by any measure. There were only three schools in the program - of them one (SNDT) has only one class of 10. The rest came from the College of enginering Pune (COEP) and the symbiosis school of economics (SSE) . Both produced huge amounts of copyvio. On Nov 2, Hisham went to COEP to shut down (or postpone it for a month, whatever happened). But SSE students continue to edit (and produce more copy vios) till now. A program, that has wasted tens of thousands of manhours of hundreds of regular wiki editors cant be called successful by any stretch of imagination. It is a an abject and complete failure. Please do not call this a success and ignore the havoc it has wrought on en wiki. As long as the foundation and program refuses to acknowledge the truth, there is little chance of any lessons being learnt. On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 13 November 2011 08:46, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. This is related to something I've been thinking about. As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and about having fun while learning. Hi Bishakha, This is a bit of a derail from your e-mail, but I wanted to clarify your use of the past tense (they *were* about contributing). I think the thread title here may be creating some confusion about what has actually happened. That, or else I may be confused myself :-) The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP, the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over: contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't died. A number of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team couldn't get resolved. The plagiarism problems were serious, and after their efforts to fix them didn't work, Hisham and Barry shut down that stream of the project. It was a hard decision to make, but I expect there's general agreement that it was the right decision. But the project itself is not over. Although, the pilot phase might be over: I'm not sure about that. I'm just clarifying this point because I think it would be good for everybody here to have the same basic understanding of what happened. And if I'm wrong, somebody might please just correct me :-) Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP, the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over: contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't died. Thanks Sue, IEP surely is not Dead yet. Also +1 to Shiju's idea regarding Article selection, this problem was faced by my class too. I was managing Data Structures class, and the problem was that plenty of Data Structures related articles are in good shape and we didn't want to touch those. So it was getting difficult for professor and students too for selecting their article, thus some of the topics were later moved on too Wikibooks which was accepted by the professor in good faith. *Thus what I would like to suggest is that, if for example we sign one class of Computer engineering department then the students of that class should be free to select any article regarding Computer Engineering, and the best place to start would be Wikiprojects like WikiProject_Computer_sciencehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer_science , WikiProject_Computinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computing etc etc, thus students will also get a chance to write about articles they like and are interested in and Wikiprojects will also gain some momentum and who knows we might get relatively better articles in there. Article selection should not necessarily be from that subject only, students should have freedom of selection of articles and professors must understand this mutually. * Please do think about it and share your views regarding it. Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 16:17, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.com wrote: The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP, the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over: contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't died. Thanks Sue, IEP surely is not Dead yet. All, Please read the subject line carefully, Death and Postmortem of IEP *PILOT* . Also to clarify, I didnt call it death, someone else at Signpost already posted a post-mortem after the close down which happened a week before it. The subject of the original mail was to inform about both to this list. I would also request people not to fork any more new threads on this with same thoughts, We already have 3 threads now. Mailing list 101 anyone? -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
*That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community.* Hisham, i was an online mentor for seven students in the PPP in the previous sem. I have done this before. I am normally a patient newbie helper. I help tens of newbies every day in Ta and en wiki. But if you make it an obligation for me to check through the edits of forty odd guys, who turn in assignments and are only angling for marks in their courses, you are turning me off. You heard what another OA surya had to say about this . You are looking at OAs as full time employees - they have a job to do, why not do it. Remember this is a volunteer project and we volunteers have only X amount of time to donate to wikipedia, OAs have other interests in Wikipedia - being a OA isnt supposed to take up all my wikitime. I certainly did not sign up for following every edit of a COEP student who shows no sign of actually wanting to voluntarily contribute to Wikipedia or any sign of learning. My onwiki time is better spent elsewhere. This is the biggest difference between my PPP experience and IEP experience. In the former i had 7 mentees, who asked me for help, when they ran into trouble, listened to what i had to say, were basically competent, produced workable quality content. I was happy to improve their content as the workload was manageable. In the IEP, i had 40, who never asked me anything (instead i am expected to go through their edits). But could be seen arguing with people who tag their content for copyright violation, adding the same copyvio content after being reverted multiple times. Getting their CAs to plead with admins if they get blocked. So for the next phase do not design a OA as someone who will track every edit of a student and correct all his mistakes - Such a thing might be possible with one on one mentoring, but even then it routinely fails in the regular adopt a editor arrangements that happen in en wiki. But with five or seven students (forget about forty) it is impossible for me to log in daily, check if they have edited, check out the diffs, cross check for copyvio and then give him/her a feedback. On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved My view is not driven by political correctness but I do want to avoid generalising all students and all faculty. Just take a look a the user talk and article discussion pages and it's immediately apparent that quite a few students and teachers wouldn't deserve blame. Many students did make mistakes - but they made the same mistakes that many newbies. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - Agree and we need to work on how we select the colleges and faculty and classes and students. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* This is something that can (and should) be led by the faculty. Some teachers have shown the way on how this can be done. 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. * Clearly the student:CA ratio needs to be reduced significantly. ...but did you mean students:CA 5:1 or 1:5? Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
I couldn't have said it better Bala. Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch) On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 16:39, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: *That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community.* Hisham, i was an online mentor for seven students in the PPP in the previous sem. I have done this before. I am normally a patient newbie helper. I help tens of newbies every day in Ta and en wiki. But if you make it an obligation for me to check through the edits of forty odd guys, who turn in assignments and are only angling for marks in their courses, you are turning me off. You heard what another OA surya had to say about this . You are looking at OAs as full time employees - they have a job to do, why not do it. Remember this is a volunteer project and we volunteers have only X amount of time to donate to wikipedia, OAs have other interests in Wikipedia - being a OA isnt supposed to take up all my wikitime. I certainly did not sign up for following every edit of a COEP student who shows no sign of actually wanting to voluntarily contribute to Wikipedia or any sign of learning. My onwiki time is better spent elsewhere. This is the biggest difference between my PPP experience and IEP experience. In the former i had 7 mentees, who asked me for help, when they ran into trouble, listened to what i had to say, were basically competent, produced workable quality content. I was happy to improve their content as the workload was manageable. In the IEP, i had 40, who never asked me anything (instead i am expected to go through their edits). But could be seen arguing with people who tag their content for copyright violation, adding the same copyvio content after being reverted multiple times. Getting their CAs to plead with admins if they get blocked. So for the next phase do not design a OA as someone who will track every edit of a student and correct all his mistakes - Such a thing might be possible with one on one mentoring, but even then it routinely fails in the regular adopt a editor arrangements that happen in en wiki. But with five or seven students (forget about forty) it is impossible for me to log in daily, check if they have edited, check out the diffs, cross check for copyvio and then give him/her a feedback. On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved My view is not driven by political correctness but I do want to avoid generalising all students and all faculty. Just take a look a the user talk and article discussion pages and it's immediately apparent that quite a few students and teachers wouldn't deserve blame. Many students did make mistakes - but they made the same mistakes that many newbies. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - Agree and we need to work on how we select the colleges and faculty and classes and students. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* This is something that can (and should) be led by the faculty. Some teachers have shown the way on how this can be done. 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. * Clearly the student:CA ratio needs to be reduced significantly. ...but did you mean students:CA 5:1 or 1:5? Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Hi all, If you are not aware of it yet, India Education Program Pilot died around a week back[1] and a post mortem was done on Signpost[2]. I wonder if we Indians like to only rejoice success's and keep silence when we fail. One could have acknowledged the death on this list. It didnt happen. Bad. I am sad, guilty, angry all at the same time. I could not give more time for being an Online Ambassador. I thought role of an OA would be to help out people who are reaching out for help, only to understand later OA needs to look what people are doing edit by edit, reach out to them and help them. That is a lesson learnt for me. The program has taught us many different lessons for each of us but are we too fast in race to pause for a moment and analyze? Plans for next rollout is already ON[3], without doing enough justice to large post-mortem. Am disappointed. While large section of post mortem completely ignored one basic premise. Quality of Indian Students Faculty. If you dont select only the interested / qualified ones, we will fail again miserably, no matter how many ambassadors are there. Probably the students in the program must be selected how ambassadors were selected in Pune and then try the pilot with 20-30 *interested* students/faculty instead of heading to a college, pushing through top management of College and making a failure out of IEP. Another thing with colleges are If you can't do in odd semester, you can't do it in even semester. So I would suggest some detailed analysis before launching any further programs. I find a lot more can be done to this Findings and Learnings[4]. It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia. Its MUST, not good to have. Infact this factor made some OA, CA's from PPI feel bad on why they are ambassadors. I personally don't believe that Indian culture had much bearing on this pilot. Some students in India – as elsewhere – are either lazy and plagiarize or they genuinely believe that close paraphrasing means something is no longer plagiarized. Please get to close to reality Hisham, Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. If IEP continues to do Marks for Wikipedia editing campaign, we will fail again, only consolation next time might be it would be easy to clean up since we would be cautious with numbers. Also certain level of competence is required for article creation (or even basic editing for that matter), I think we need to acknowledge it and shouldnt just be going around with the notion Everyone can edit simply without adding a pinch of Salt. WP:COMPETENCE[5] is not about subject matter expertise, its about Competence required for Wikipedia editing, many of which cannot be practically expected from all Indian students / Faculty. [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report [3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.html [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On 12 November 2011 18:10, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote: If you are not aware of it yet, India Education Program Pilot died around a week back[1] and a post mortem was done on Signpost[2]. I wonder if we Indians like to only rejoice success's and keep silence when we fail. Srikantha, thanks for posting this. I did not know about it till you posted it and I am sure there are many like me. It is worrying but at the same time offers us a chance to make things better for the future. As I see it, the majority of the challenges have been around plagiarism and copyright violations. (I wish we wouldn't conflate these things - they aren't the same.) There are multiple ways to solve this - one is technology and the other one is the age old methods of 'capacity building' and 'sensitisation'. Question is, are the latter two areas of work for the India Programs office because they aren't short term or easy. A via-media is to run all submission through some http://turnitin.com/ type system to check. Or maybe a hybrid - where they don't edit on the mainspace but say on a sandbox run in India by, perhaps, the Chapter and then they graduate? It's easy to overwhelm the system when so many students sign up - a ladder of evolution in to a Wikipedia editor might help. As might the idea of pairing/twining either the students together (they check each other) or student with current editor (which may have already failed). Either way, I agree - it isn't a post-mortem (it's such a gruesome word!) that's needed but some honesty and vulnerability to learn, accept and act on the feedback. Thank you. Best, Gautam http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Our mails coincided, Srikanth, but my comments inline. hisham On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:10 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote: Hi all, If you are not aware of it yet, India Education Program Pilot died around a week back[1] and a post mortem was done on Signpost[2]. I wonder if we Indians like to only rejoice success's and keep silence when we fail. One could have acknowledged the death on this list. It didnt happen. Bad. That's not accurate. The dates are as follows: It was concluded in all but 1 class of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the assignements were concluded.) It continues in 1 class at this college and at 1 class at the SNDT Women's University. We asked College of Engineering Pune to stop the program in their classrooms last week. It is still being continued at this college by 1 professor nevertheless. I am sad, guilty, angry all at the same time. I could not give more time for being an Online Ambassador. I thought role of an OA would be to help out people who are reaching out for help, only to understand later OA needs to look what people are doing edit by edit, reach out to them and help them. That is a lesson learnt for me. The program has taught us many different lessons for each of us but are we too fast in race to pause for a moment and analyze? Plans for next rollout is already ON[3], without doing enough justice to large post-mortem. Am disappointed. There is going to be a through analysis of this pilot. The links you are referring are not plans for a rollout; they are just an invite to see if any existing community members in other cities could invest the kind of time (during work hours and in classrooms) that Campus Ambassadors need to do. While large section of post mortem completely ignored one basic premise. Quality of Indian Students Faculty. If you dont select only the interested / qualified ones, we will fail again miserably, no matter how many ambassadors are there. Probably the students in the program must be selected how ambassadors were selected in Pune and then try the pilot with 20-30 *interested* students/faculty instead of heading to a college, pushing through top management of College and making a failure out of IEP. Another thing with colleges are If you can't do in odd semester, you can't do it in even semester. So I would suggest some detailed analysis before launching any further programs. At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management. Having said that we should have looked at much lower student numbers. I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters I find a lot more can be done to this Findings and Learnings[4]. Please do share your additional points. As I mentioned, it's very much work in progress. It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia. Fully agree. Having said that, given the relatively small community size in India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that Campus Ambassadors need to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies. We must however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward. Its MUST, not good to have. Infact this factor made some OA, CA's from PPI feel bad on why they are ambassadors. I personally don't believe that Indian culture had much bearing on this pilot. Some students in India – as elsewhere – are either lazy and plagiarize or they genuinely believe that close paraphrasing means something is no longer plagiarized. Please get to close to reality Hisham, As i mentioned in my mail, we are going to do am objective review of this and this will inform the way forward. Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. If IEP continues to do Marks for Wikipedia editing campaign, we will fail again, only consolation next time might be it would be easy to clean up since we would be cautious with numbers. Also certain level of competence is required for article creation (or even basic editing for that matter), I think we need to acknowledge it and shouldnt just be going around with the notion Everyone can edit simply without adding a pinch of Salt. WP:COMPETENCE[5] is not about subject matter expertise, its about Competence required for Wikipedia editing, many of which cannot be practically expected from all Indian students / Faculty. There are many learnings and we will take all of them on board. [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report [3]
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On 12 November 2011 18:55, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.com wrote: It used to be easier to spot copyvios on English Wikipedia earlier, but due to some issues with Google, the bot which detected the copyvios (CorenBot) is no longer running, though I have come to understand that Jimmy and Coren are having talks with Google on this. Fair enough. Just that at the scale the India program will run at, a technology solution might very well be a easier first step than human interventions. I think sandbox editing before going to mainspace would work out well here. But a sandbox in a Chapter hosted wiki doesn't seem right to me, because it is almost totally disconnected from the ground realities at English Wikipedia. Also, editing on an enwiki sandbox will enable better feedback Quite possibly correct. Just wondering about it in terms of DMCA liability for the WMF and more. Thank you. Best, Gautam http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:28 PM, Gautam John wrote: Srikantha, thanks for posting this. I did not know about it till you posted it and I am sure there are many like me. It is worrying but at the same time offers us a chance to make things better for the future. Apologies, Gautam, Srikanth and others, I ought to have posted the updates on the India mailing list too. As I see it, the majority of the challenges have been around plagiarism and copyright violations. (I wish we wouldn't conflate these things - they aren't the same.) Agree There are multiple ways to solve this - one is technology and the other one is the age old methods of 'capacity building' and 'sensitisation'. Question is, are the latter two areas of work for the India Programs office because they aren't short term or easy. A via-media is to run all submission through some http://turnitin.com/ type system to check. Or maybe a hybrid - where they don't edit on the mainspace but say on a sandbox run in India by, perhaps, the Chapter and then they graduate? It's easy to overwhelm the system when so many students sign up - a ladder of evolution in to a Wikipedia editor might help. As might the idea of pairing/twining either the students together (they check each other) or student with current editor (which may have already failed). All valid suggestions and we will consider them all in our analysis of what went wrong and how/if we can do things better going forward. that's needed but some honesty and vulnerability to learn, accept and act on the feedback. Absolutely, Gautam, and that's exactly how we will approach this. hisham___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:02 PM, Gautam John wrote: Fair enough. Just that at the scale the India program will run at, a technology solution might very well be a easier first step than human interventions. If we can't manage the scale (as we couldn't in this pilot), then we will reduce the scale. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a interested students only program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:56, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote: That's not accurate. The dates are as follows: It was concluded in all but 1 class of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the assignements were concluded.) It continues in 1 class at this college and at 1 class at the SNDT Women's University. We asked College of Engineering Pune to stop the program in their classrooms last week. It is still being continued at this college by 1 professor nevertheless. Probably the same could have been highlighted enough at Signpost. The signpost heading conveys its closed down. There is going to be a through analysis of this pilot. The links you are referring are not plans for a rollout; they are just an invite to see if any existing community members in other cities could invest the kind of time (during work hours and in classrooms) that Campus Ambassadors need to do. Thanks for clarifying, helps much. At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management. Well I cant help point CoEP where the director was much excited about the program and without his push directly / indirectly, I wonder if 800+ students would have voluntarily signed up. I will never agree if anyone says 800+ students voluntarily asked/agreed for Wikipedia assignments without staff / whoever else asking them to do so. Having said that we should have looked at much lower student numbers. Agree I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters Well it was my suggestion/opinion if you are planning next roll out in Jan. Odd semesters in Indian colleges are longer ones July- Dec typically and give time for students / staff to do extra things. Even semesters are shorter Jan-May (April in many cases) so the duration for anything in colleges are limited in even sem. This is the reason why you will find most extra-curriculars happening in odd-sem. I am not sure if we did a time audit of the pilot, but it took very late to have students start editing and they were stopped almost in 2-3 weeks. We may not have that much time to engage with students / faculty on even semesters. It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia. Fully agree. Having said that, given the relatively small community size in India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that Campus Ambassadors need to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies. We must however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward. I would say make CAs as wikipedians with atleast 500+ edits on en.wiki to give them a flavor of complexities in enwiki before they help out others. In other words, start early on CA's get more commitment early on, that before they go ahead and preach(teach) they practice(edit) enough. -- Regards Srikanth.L ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Iv used turnitin during my MBA and can say that Iv seen people upload their projects there, note where the software catches them, change the language in that part and re-submit. People will go to any lengths .. Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:33:12 +0530 From: sodabot...@gmail.com To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) Keep the number low - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a interested students only program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. 2) Penalise those who copy paste - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. 3) The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:33, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a interested students only program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. That's true. The enwiki community is losing its patience really. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. A bit harder to enforce, since academic plagiarism is practised en masse by many professors themselves (not generalizing, just saying that the problem goes way deeper than the students). 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l Swaroop Rao Steering Committee member, United States Education Program ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Also, it seems that CoEP has most of the problems; I think that CoEP being an engineering college, is more rigid in its working than other science/commerce/liberal arts colleges. What we could do is branch out into other streams (other than engineering I mean); Law for example: Why not have law students editing about Intellectual Property Rights (I know the irony we'll have in case we have copyvios out of that). And the course structuring in other colleges are a bit different, so they could accommodate programs like the Wikimedia education programs much easier. Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch) Steering Committee member, United States Education Program On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:39, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:33, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a interested students only program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. That's true. The enwiki community is losing its patience really. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. A bit harder to enforce, since academic plagiarism is practised en masse by many professors themselves (not generalizing, just saying that the problem goes way deeper than the students). 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l Swaroop Rao Steering Committee member, United States Education Program ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
From Bala's words... //Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. // Sure. We can (OAs) guide the students can help them in editing kindaa things. But, expecting OAs should keep an eye on the particular student's article keep tracking them is not a good idea. And, doing it in this way is a small English Wikipedia Admin kindaa thing. Many OAs including me, are contributing taking initiatives to develop their language projects, the OA role gives them a burden really. Because I felt it. ONLINE AMBASSADORING IS NOT REALLY ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA ADMINISTRATING ROLE. Because, I indirectly directed to that role only. I really DISLIKE that. + I am agree with the number of students. (50) Thank you. *$U®¥∩* http://goo.gl/RoMyo.com http://FirefoxSurya.blogspot.com http://about.me/suryaceg On 12 November 2011 19:39, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:33, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) *Keep the number low* - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a interested students only program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. That's true. The enwiki community is losing its patience really. 2) *Penalise those who copy paste* - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. A bit harder to enforce, since academic plagiarism is practised en masse by many professors themselves (not generalizing, just saying that the problem goes way deeper than the students). 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l Swaroop Rao Steering Committee member, United States Education Program
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. I think others have raised a few valid points regarding experience of the CA, the number of people that a CA can manage and what a CA was supposed to do and ended up doing. warm regards, Pradeep Mohandas ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
Hey all, I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge. The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many of my friends get the feel of it too. These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country. - Arjun On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.comwrote: hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- - Arjun ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. The reason I am telling this is, In India (in general) it is not the students who are deciding the course (and career) that they want to study/pursue. Parents, relatives, and community around them decide that. So even though the student's interest may lie in a specific area, he might be studying a different course. Allowing students to edit in a topic that they like will bring in more original content. But the issue with this methodology is, the role of Professors might be reduced, and the role of CA and OA might be increased. And I am not sure how the But this methodology is adopted very successfully in Kerala using School wiki http://schoolwiki.in. But we may say, that is school children and they are not mature enough for wikipedia editing. Again that is our misconception. In general, personally I am more interested to target school students (high school and Plus 2) than college students. School children are fantastic. It is true that most of us under estimate them. But to see the successful result from India, see the young and wonderful wikipedians we have in Malayalam wikipedia and wikisource. *Note: *Please note that I am replying to this thread as a Malayalam wiki community memeber. Shiju On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.comwrote: That's true Arjun, there is a lot of interest in this program in many colleges, and this is going untapped. No, its not dead for sure. It was a pilot, and it didn't come out pretty; no issues, that's how we learn. I think that one thing we learnt is that the US model may not work out well for India, so we need to develop an India specific model for this (That's what we've been trying to do in these previous mails actually I guess). Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch) Steering Committee member, United States Education Program On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 23:36, Arjun mangol arjun.man...@gmail.comwrote: Hey all, I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge. The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many of my friends get the feel of it too. These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country. - Arjun On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.comwrote: hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- - Arjun ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote: Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved My view is not driven by political correctness but I do want to avoid generalising all students and all faculty. Just take a look a the user talk and article discussion pages and it's immediately apparent that quite a few students and teachers wouldn't deserve blame. Many students did make mistakes - but they made the same mistakes that many newbies. So here is what is to be done: 1) Keep the number low - Agree and we need to work on how we select the colleges and faculty and classes and students. 2) Penalise those who copy paste This is something that can (and should) be led by the faculty. Some teachers have shown the way on how this can be done. 3) The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. Clearly the student:CA ratio needs to be reduced significantly. ...but did you mean students:CA 5:1 or 1:5? Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote: On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:56, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote: That's not accurate. The dates are as follows: It was concluded in all but 1 class of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the assignements were concluded.) It continues in 1 class at this college and at 1 class at the SNDT Women's University. We asked College of Engineering Pune to stop the program in their classrooms last week. It is still being continued at this college by 1 professor nevertheless. Probably the same could have been highlighted enough at Signpost. The signpost heading conveys its closed down. We had requested Signpost to amend it's heading. At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management. Well I cant help point CoEP where the director was much excited about the program and without his push directly / indirectly, I wonder if 800+ students would have voluntarily signed up. I will never agree if anyone says 800+ students voluntarily asked/agreed for Wikipedia assignments without staff / whoever else asking them to do so. True. However, even at CoEP, faculty were at liberty not to join the program (and indeed, most of them chose not to.) However, the point made on the learnings ought to be taken in conjunction with that of faculty involvement. Director buy-in is important but can only compliment and not substitute for faculty involvement and capability.In the classes where we have got better results than in others, this played a critical role. I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters Well it was my suggestion/opinion if you are planning next roll out in Jan. Odd semesters in Indian colleges are longer ones July- Dec typically and give time for students / staff to do extra things. Even semesters are shorter Jan-May (April in many cases) so the duration for anything in colleges are limited in even sem. This is the reason why you will find most extra-curriculars happening in odd-sem. I am not sure if we did a time audit of the pilot, but it took very late to have students start editing and they were stopped almost in 2-3 weeks. We may not have that much time to engage with students / faculty on even semesters. Ah, understood. That's an interesting and great point. It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia. Fully agree. Having said that, given the relatively small community size in India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that Campus Ambassadors need to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies. We must however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward. I would say make CAs as wikipedians with atleast 500+ edits on en.wiki to give them a flavor of complexities in enwiki before they help out others. In other words, start early on CA's get more commitment early on, that before they go ahead and preach(teach) they practice(edit) enough. I don't think anyone would suggest that CAs shouldn't edit more or understand Wikipedia policies better. Having said that, the experience in the US suggested that newbie CAs were as good as (and sometimes even better) than existing Wikipedians in the role of CAs. (They hypothesis on this is that they were helping teach Wikipedia to newbies - so they were able to calibrate and structure their messaging accordingly.) As I said a sentence earlier, we do need to modify our selection, training and ongoing development regime for CAs - but edit count alone might not be the only measure (though an important one.) hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:37 PM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote: Iv used turnitin during my MBA and can say that Iv seen people upload their projects there, note where the software catches them, change the language in that part and re-submit. People will go to any lengths .. We do need to work on something going forward for sure, whatever the actual package is. ...but we'll certainly look at turnitin for sure. Thanks, Pranav hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 8:04 PM, Swaroop Rao wrote: Also, it seems that CoEP has most of the problems; I think that CoEP being an engineering college, is more rigid in its working than other science/commerce/liberal arts colleges. What we could do is branch out into other streams (other than engineering I mean); Law for example: Why not have law students editing about Intellectual Property Rights (I know the irony we'll have in case we have copyvios out of that). And the course structuring in other colleges are a bit different, so they could accommodate programs like the Wikimedia education programs much easier. Actually, my view is that many colleges (regardless of stream) have the structural flexibility to accommodate a program like this. To illustrate, there is (in most cases) an option for class assignments (marked or otherwise) to be determined by the faculty (sometimes independently and sometimes after getting the approval of the Director and / or an academic council of some kind.) Event those affiliated to Pune University, for instance, had this kind of flexibility. We do need to look at what kind of streams we should look at it. Another learning for instance is that a first year engineering student ends up (in many cases) being taught basic fundamentals - which are either well covered on Wikipedia or on which it is difficult to put in a meaningful entry. A 3rd year arts/humanities student does not have this particular problem - but sometimes are more concerned by placements / admissions than academic endeavors. My point being that we need to look at the results of the pilot and then establish patterns which can help evaluate the pilot and inform the way forward. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
Thanks Shiju. I raised same points yesterday , in Malayalam wikimedia list , in a related thread. Thanks for bringing this discussion here Anivar On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. The reason I am telling this is, In India (in general) it is not the students who are deciding the course (and career) that they want to study/pursue. Parents, relatives, and community around them decide that. So even though the student's interest may lie in a specific area, he might be studying a different course. Allowing students to edit in a topic that they like will bring in more original content. But the issue with this methodology is, the role of Professors might be reduced, and the role of CA and OA might be increased. And I am not sure how the But this methodology is adopted very successfully in Kerala using School wiki http://schoolwiki.in. But we may say, that is school children and they are not mature enough for wikipedia editing. Again that is our misconception. In general, personally I am more interested to target school students (high school and Plus 2) than college students. School children are fantastic. It is true that most of us under estimate them. But to see the successful result from India, see the young and wonderful wikipedians we have in Malayalam wikipedia and wikisource. *Note: *Please note that I am replying to this thread as a Malayalam wiki community memeber. Shiju On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.comwrote: That's true Arjun, there is a lot of interest in this program in many colleges, and this is going untapped. No, its not dead for sure. It was a pilot, and it didn't come out pretty; no issues, that's how we learn. I think that one thing we learnt is that the US model may not work out well for India, so we need to develop an India specific model for this (That's what we've been trying to do in these previous mails actually I guess). Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch) Steering Committee member, United States Education Program On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 23:36, Arjun mangol arjun.man...@gmail.comwrote: Hey all, I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge. The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many of my friends get the feel of it too. These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country. - Arjun On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.comwrote: hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- - Arjun ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 8:59 PM, Surya Prakash wrote: From Bala's words... //Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. // Sure. We can (OAs) guide the students can help them in editing kindaa things. But, expecting OAs should keep an eye on the particular student's article keep tracking them is not a good idea. And, doing it in this way is a small English Wikipedia Admin kindaa thing. Many OAs including me, are contributing taking initiatives to develop their language projects, the OA role gives them a burden really. Because I felt it. ONLINE AMBASSADORING IS NOT REALLY ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA ADMINISTRATING ROLE. Because, I indirectly directed to that role only. I really DISLIKE that. I hear you Surya, and we will keep this in mind. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 10:39 PM, Pradeep Mohandas wrote: hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. Absolutely. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Absolutely. hisham___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara wrote: Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. Agreed. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
On Nov 13, 2011, at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex wrote: Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is, about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of them editing the articles on the same topic. The reason I am telling this is, In India (in general) it is not the students who are deciding the course (and career) that they want to study/pursue. Parents, relatives, and community around them decide that. So even though the student's interest may lie in a specific area, he might be studying a different course. Allowing students to edit in a topic that they like will bring in more original content. But the issue with this methodology is, the role of Professors might be reduced, and the role of CA and OA might be increased. And I am not sure how the But this methodology is adopted very successfully in Kerala using School wiki. But we may say, that is school children and they are not mature enough for wikipedia editing. Again that is our misconception. In general, personally I am more interested to target school students (high school and Plus 2) than college students. School children are fantastic. It is true that most of us under estimate them. But to see the successful result from India, see the young and wonderful wikipedians we have in Malayalam wikipedia and wikisource. Note: Please note that I am replying to this thread as a Malayalam wiki community memeber. Shiju Those are very valid points, Shiju. ...and we should and will take lessons from the malayalam wikipedia and wikisource initiatives, and other similar ones. is what you are suggesting something similar to a student's club hisham___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:36 PM, Arjun mangol wrote: Hey all, I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge. The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many of my friends get the feel of it too. These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country. - Arjun all valid ideas, Arjun - and we will evaluate all of them (and all those shared on this mail thread as well.) we'll be reaching out to everyone and anyone who's interested to get their experiences, learnings, suggestions, etc. as we move forward in our evaluation. this will be an open and collaborative process - and i invite everyone to please take part in this. we'll send out details on this asap. hisham ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Nov 13, 2011, at 12:07 AM, Swaroop Rao wrote: That's true Arjun, there is a lot of interest in this program in many colleges, and this is going untapped. No, its not dead for sure. It was a pilot, and it didn't come out pretty; no issues, that's how we learn. I think that one thing we learnt is that the US model may not work out well for India, so we need to develop an India specific model for this (That's what we've been trying to do in these previous mails actually I guess). Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch) Agree with you fully, and as I mentioned earlier, we will approach the assessment of the pilot and the way forward objectively, comprehensively and dispassionately. hisham___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.comwrote: hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it dying. Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll try to gain new heights again. Arnav, Good to hear back from one of the campus ambassadors. I think it would be great if we could hear back from many more of you - as those who were on the front lines of this program, what are your views on it? What did you think worked? What would you change? What gave you a feeling of pride? What made you worried? By you, I don't mean just you, but all the campus ambassadors who are on this list. Hope you'll will write in and share your thoughts on these or other aspects. And in the midst of all the flak, congratulations, all CAs. With the huge number of students overwhelming the program, each of you probably ended up doing way more than you had signed up for. I hope you continue to take and feel pride in that very sincere effort, regardless of the outcome of this. Also - I would love to hear from Nitika, who was dealing with this program on the ground. (What did you make of this, Nitika? Pros and cons?) Please don't feel pressured by my request; we've already heard back from en:wp editors - those comments are totally valid and must be taken into account in any future iteration of the program. At the same time, I feel we also need to hear the perspectives and voices of those who worked on the program in any capacity. Cheers Bishakha -- Thanks Arnav (ricku). (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
