<div>Hi all,</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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]. </div>
<div><br></div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204, 204, 204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia.</blockquote><div>Its MUST, not good to have. Infact this factor made some OA, CA's from PPI feel bad on why they are ambassadors.</div></div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204, 204, 204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<font face="sans-serif"><span style="line-height:19px"> 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.</span></font></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
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<div><br></div><div>[1] <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune" target="_blank">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune</a></div>
<div>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report</a></div><div>[3] <a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.html" target="_blank">http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.html</a></div>
<div>[4] <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program" target="_blank">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program</a></div><div>
[5] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE</a></div>-- <br>
Regards<br>Srikanth.L<br>