Well said, Hisham, Srikeit at al. Nobody's asking for rah-rah excitement. Being dispassionate and critical is the goal. Being hostile and dickish is unhelpful -- there's no possible useful end that could serve.
So: If you're adding more heat than light to a conversation, please don't join the conversation. If you're attacking others and calling into question their legitimacy in being here, without them having violated any of the ground rules of good faith behavior, you begin violating those norms yourself. Calm down, have a tea, and read some good poetry (or write it, if you're truly suffering :-). At WMF, we'd be completely happy to abandon the Global Education Program model altogether if it turned out to be a failure, and we'd be happy to abandon it for India or other countries if it turned out to be a failure there. Nobody wants to spend $$$ and blood/sweat equity (the only type that exists in nonprofits) on stuff that isn't achieving its intended impact. So far, however, what I've seen is a very successful US initiative followed by an India pilot which has encountered very serious, deep challenges with contribution quality. The analysis that I've seen so far really suggests that what it comes down to is abject contribution quality by lots of the participating students and a routine pattern of copyright infringement (and I would label it plagiarism if they're not identifying the source). Let me know if I got that wrong. That sucks, but if so, that's a problem that needs to be named to be tackled in a serious fashion. No amount of tweaking the program parameters would have solved the issues of the scale and type that have been pointed out. This goes to the fundamentals. And - to stay with the sandbox metaphor from another thread - if the majority of contributors to a university-based program in India can reach won't be able to contribute at an acceptable quality in WP proper, then perhaps it's also time to think about more aggressive sandboxing of contributions early in the game, at least when we're dealing with a course where we either don't know what to expect, or we _do_ based on experiences like the one to date. Possibly even using an external sandbox. Lastly, let's not forget that we haven't made any determination as to what the best methods are to gain, and keep, great new contributors in India (or elsewhere, for that matter). We can, and should, continue to experiment with many different approaches, including some of the suggestions that have been made in previous threads. All the energy, including the occasional flamewar, that I'm seeing here really speaks tons to the strengths of the India community as a whole. Energy, creativity, intelligence and healthy tension are the ingredients of success, not failure. Srikeit, I'll unfortunately miss your talk on Saturday as I'll be at the hackathon. But I look forward to hearing about it and hopefully catching up on Friday. :-) -- 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