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
- Lets make this world a better and more informative place
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 9:59 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak@gmail.com> wrote:
--On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 13:08, Ram Shankar Yadav <ramshankaryadav@gmail.com> wrote:
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)Article 49 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%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" '
Regards
Srikanth.L
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