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:
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