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/E…
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Specia…
[3]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.…
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Educat…
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
Hi all who are discussing this thread, while I would acknowledge perspective of online en:wp community ,We need to avoid knee jerk reactions and coming to conclusions from details available sitting just on line , as Ms.Bishakha madam rightly pointed out that we need to have perspective from CAs not only that it would always a better thing to have proper systematic field survey with end user (in our case editor).
Most of the CAs to were not experienced wikipedians.Agin some body else is preparing wiki training material for them, rather why not give a thought that we give opportunity to student community itself to prepare their own training material in a contemporary language of their own. rather than starting the whole programme at college level where students are already in pressure for rest of the things why not start from student camps at the time of 10th stadard anual vacation and 12th annual vacation which is longest vacation for Indian students and their minds are more relaxed at that point of time.May be next two years they will not do any major editing on wiki but by the time of graduation we need not teach editing techniques and rules from the basic.
Warm regards
-Mahitgar
1. Re: Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
-- #DelayedMail (Bishakha Datta)
2. Re: Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot
(Bishakha Datta)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:05:57 +0530
From: Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian
Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail
To: Wikimedia India Community list
<wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<CAFYF+GqxQo1uzpg2aSCTSoHsQ_0R5RJtNag4Y1-LdnCs2iHUUg(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara <sonara.arnav(a)gmail.com>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". 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>
>
>
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>
>
*CIOL : "Mumbai to host national WikiConference"*
http://www.ciol.com/Developer/Developer/News-Reports/Mumbai-to-host-nationa…
*Jimmy Wales to deliver the Keynote on November 18 at University
Convocation Hall*
*
*
*The Mumbai Wikipedia Community and the Wikimedia Chapter, India are
hosting the first ever WikiConference in Mumbai, India!*
*
*
*The conference will be graced by the founder, open-source evangelist and
chairman emeritus of Wikimedia foundation, Jimmy Wales, said a press
release.*
*
*
*According to the release, the Conference will have a distinct Indian
flavour and deal primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia,
English and Indic language Wikipedia projects in the country, possible
partnerships and collaborations and the WikiCommunity editing on these
issues, whether in India or abroad.*
*
*
*The three day event will be held from 18-20 November, 2011 at Convocation
Hall, University of Mumbai, Fort Campus.*
*
*
*Arjuna Rao Chavala, president, Wikimedia chapter said, "We look forward to
organising the conference on an annual basis to bring together Indian
Wikipedians from 20+ Indian language projects to share learnings and best
practices. The event will help catalyze contributors in building Knowledge
Society through free and open education projects."*
*
*
*Speaking on the occasion, Pranav Curumsey, Chairperson, Organizing
Committee, WikiConference India said, "The conference aims to promote the
vision of the founder Mr. Wales, 'Imagine a world in which every single
person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge.'”*
*
*
*He added, “It is very encouraging to see ad-free participation showing a
keen interest in attending this conference confirming our belief that India
is free knowledge ready.”*
*
*
*The release further added that, the event will see thousands of
Wikipedians from all over the country pouring in for sessions covering on
different topics.*
*
*
*Moksh Juneja, secretary, Organising Committee, WikiConference India added,
"The conference aims to serve as an annual platform for all Indian
Wikipedians to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange
useful tips and best practices.”*
*
*
*“We have been overwhelmed with the ad-free participation across India
where we received 7000 plus entries for scholarships and 550 plus papers
were submitted to be presented at the WikiConference India," concluded
Juneja.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Dear Wikimedians,
The traction for Wikimedia projects and content in Indian languages (and
Indian content in English) has been growing over the last decade thanks to
the passion and tireless contributions of several Wikimedians. We are
getting set for WikiConference India 2011 which is around the corner. The
Wikimedia Chapter Executive Committee (EC) and the Conference organising
team thought it is appropriate to recognize the most noteworthy
contributors to Indian language projects and Indian content in English
during the conference.
Arun Ramarathnam and Naveen Francis from the EC are leading this
initiative. The process for the recognition has been prepared and a well
diversified Jury is identified. Details of the process and the Jury are
enclosed for your perusal.
I would like to appeal to all of you to spare few minutes to think of
fellow wikimedians who made a significant difference over the first decade
of Wikimedia movement and nominate them for the recognition.
Further communication on the wiki based nomination form would follow from
the Jury. Please spread this communication across other relevant lists and
participate enthusiastically and help make this initiative, the first
collective effort to appreciate stellar contributions from the community a
success.
Cheers
Arjuna Rao Chavala
President, Wikimedia India
***
Noteworthy Wikimedian Recognition
The Recognition
Wikimedia projects have been active in India for a few years and the
journey has been exciting (Wikimedia Chapter First Annual
report<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/File:WMIN-AnnualReport2010-11.pdf>,
Gautam John's article<http://gkjohn.posterous.com/thoughts-on-wikipedia-in-india>and
Wikimedia
Foundation article<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_India_Chronicles_%28150dpi%29.pdf>).
This has been made possible by the contributions of hundreds of Wikimedians
across various Wikimedia projects. WikiConference India 2011 is the first
conference and largest congregation of Wikimedians in India across
Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia India chapter Executive committee
believes it would be befitting to use this opportunity to recognize
noteworthy contributions of some of the best contributors to our projects.
The objective of this recognition is to appreciate Wikimedians
(contributing to India focused projects) from across Wikimedia projects and
languages for their contributions.
The nomination process
- Any Wikimedian can nominate any other wikimedian of their choice for
the recognition (preferred). Self nominations are also allowed.
- Nominees for the Recognition should have made significant
contributions to Wikimedia India projects or the movement. Contributions
include content, Outreach and contributions in any other form.
- Nominations should be through a filled Nomination form on the Wikimedia
India wiki <http://wiki.wikimedia.in/>.
- Incomplete nominations will not be considered.
- The jury's decision would be final.
Eligibility Criterion
Any wikimedian other than current Members of the Wikimedia India Executive
committee, members of the Jury, Wiki Conference India Office bearers,
staff/contractors of the Wikimedia foundation or anyone paid directly for
their time/effort by Wikimedia organisations are eligible for these
recognitions.
The Jury
Jury constitution
The chapter has constituted a Jury with members from the Chapter Executive
committee, Wikimedia Foundation India office, Conference organisers and
Community and other key stakeholders.
Jury composition
1. Achal Prabhala
2. Arun Ramarathnam
3. Ashwin Baindur
4. Bishaka Datta
5. Hisham Mundol
6. Jayanta Nath
7. Naveen Francis
8. Pradeep Mohandas
9. Shiju Alex
Jury's role and responsibility
The role of the jury will be to select Wikimedians for the recognition from
the nominations made.
Key dates
- Announcement of call for nominations to community: 9th Nov 2011,
Wednesday.
- Last date for nomination submission:13th Nov 2011, Sunday
- Finalisation of Jury decision:17th Nov 2011, Thursday
The Recognition ceremony
The Chapter Executive committee will conduct a formal recognition ceremony
in the WikiConference 2011 to recognise the winners. The winners would be
given a certificate/citation.
***
For some reasons, lot of mails are getting queued for "Message has a
suspicious header" and needs manual approval since yesterday(which is why
you might have noted emails coming in bulk). Please note there will be delay
in delivery of mails on list. Let me check if there is a bug already / file
one with ops. Thanks.
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
Hi all,
We have closed the registrations for the conference. Thank you for your
interest and looking forward to seeing you at conference. If you have
missed registering, see you at next conference. :)
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
Hello all,
As most of you have known, Fundraising for 2011 have started. The one big
change is INR is added to list of currencies along with atleast ~40 other
currencies it seems. As such option is present only for credit cards, heard
debit cards might get added in a week and inquiries are on for adding
netbanking as well. If you have any suggestions specific to India, please
use the local testing talk page[1]. Now that we have INR in currency,
please help translate[2] into as many Indic languages.
We might be late this year, next year probably we could have Shiju /
Santhosh / Hisham instead of Brandon on the Sitenotice banner :D ;) ;)
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2011/Local_testing/IN
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011/Translation
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
Dear All,
I checked below link on wiki-meta page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Statistics, but the statistics shown in this link looks to be much old.
The latest statistics is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias.
Just for e.g. 1st link shows 37,03,613 articles in English where the real time data shows number as 37,90,952. This is applicable for all languages.
Can someone place the right link so that we will get the real time data on meta-wiki page.....
With Regards,
Mandar V. Kulkarni
*Will young India take to editing Wikipedia?"*
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_will-young-india-take-to-editing-wikip…http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/12112011/11main%20edition-pg7-0.pdf (
The print version is a must see)
*At the age of 10, Srikant Kedia began inserting his name into Wikipedia
articles as a prank, leading to several of his accounts being blocked.
However, a year ago, Kedia turned into a serious Wikipedian after finding
that he could make contributions to Wikipedia in Oriya — his first
language. “Now, I am part of the sum of all human knowledge,” gushed the
18-year-old college student from Cuttack.*
*
*
*At the upcoming WikiConference in Mumbai, Wikipedians from across the
country will come together to chart out an action plan for the future of
the user-generated online encyclopaedia in India. And they hope that the
youth will play a major role.*
*
*
*Computer savvy, with plenty of time on their hands and a direct
involvement in the sphere of knowledge and education, students are ideal
candidates for a project like Wikipedia, which is completely
volunteer-driven.*
*
*
*Srikant Ramakrishnan, a 19-year-old computer science student in
Coimbatore, began editing on Wikipedia when he was 13. He now has 10,000
edits on English Wikipedia.*
*
*
*With endless access to knowledge that is constantly evolving and the
thrill of contributing to something that will be of use to others, these
bright youngsters have discovered that Wikipedia can be just as addictive
as Facebook. Take the case of Surya Prakash, 18, the youngest administrator
on Tamil Wikipedia. He admits to spending most of his holidays and free
time at his campus browsing centre. Instead of status updates, he borrows
his friends’ laptops to make an urgent edit or to update pages. And in
Kozhikode, Kerala, Netha Hussain, a 20-year-old medical student, likes
chatting with her friends as they make improvements on the same Wikipedia
article and compare notes.*
*
*
*But what would drive a young person to contribute to something that is
anonymous in nature and with no monetary gain? “Wikipedia has helped me
understand concepts in medicine. Whenever I notice an insufficiency in a
medicine-related article, I look up authentic websites/books and edit that
article. So I’m learning while editing,” said Hussain.*
*
*
*Prakash, who did his schooling in Tamil, said, “Having conversations with
foreigners has helped me develop my English. I’ve learned how to write
professionally. I have also picked up skills on how to convince and bargain
with people,” he said, referring to the extensive dialogue that goes on in
the back-end of every Wikipedia page whenever an addition or edit is
brought to question.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
*Important Note *: The publisher ( DNA / Dainik Bhaskar ) of the above news
article owns the copyrights of the article / content. Request to kindly not
reproduce or circulate the content further. The information is only shared
only with an internal community who have been featured on this article.
All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
*DNA : "Here’s chance to become Wiki editors"*
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_heres-chance-to-become-wiki-editors_1…
*Achu Kunameara, 10, from Kochi, uses Wikipedia on a daily basis to promote
his mother tongue by regularly editing and uploading content in Malayalam.*
*
*
*Now he will present a paper on how students like him are using Wikipedia
to help generate content, at the Wikipedia conference to be held at the
Mumbai University’s Fort campus from November 18 to 20. “I started using
Wikipedia when I was in class IV. Instead of using its content, I started
editing some articles,’’ he said.*
*Like Kunameara, many people in the age group of 10 to 30 are using and
generating content on Wikipedia.*
*
*
*Now, Wikipedia is encouraging Indian youth to become content generators
and editors, as well as being the end users. *
*At the two-day conference, workshops like Editahon and Hackathon, will
teach students how to edit content on Wikipedia and will give chance to
tech savvy youth to develop components for mobile applications, offline
open source application and improving its interface.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : The publisher ( DNA / Dainik Bhaskar ) of the above news
article owns the copyrights of the article / content. Request to kindly not
reproduce or circulate the content further. The information is only shared
only with an internal community who have been featured on this article.
All copyrights are duly acknowledged.