[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

[Bala Jeyaraman]

>>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.
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