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

[Bishakha Datta]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com>wrote:

> Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is,
> about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to
> contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of
> them editing the articles on the same topic.
>
> This is related to something I've been thinking about.

As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were
about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and
about having fun while learning.

In practice, did it remain like that? Going by what I read, it sounded like
many of the students were under high stress to turn in these wikipedia
assignments to their teachers - and used every possible shortcut in the
book. (Exactly what I would have done in my student days).

I may be totally off-base on this, but am curious, so would appreciate some
info.

My question is: if this becomes a high stress exam type situ, is the
student likely to a)either see it as fun b)go back to it later for fun? In
which case, is this student likely to become a prospective wikipedia
editor, or is this student going to treat this as a one-time thing and
never want to do this ever again? (Given relationship with stress, exams,
teachers, marks)?

Also - larger related qs: is the aim of the India Ed program to increase
article content on wp (which can be done short-term) or to increase the
number of editors? Or both?

Cheers,
Bishakha
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