Hi Online Ambassadors and Campus Ambassadors!
I am emailing to request for urgent, emergency help from all of you who are
able and willing. Can you dedicate 30 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours in the next
week to help?
Here's the story: As you know, the Global Education Program is also
operating in India. While some Indian students have contributed spectacular
content, a large of number of the edits coming from the participating Indian
students has been of extremely poor quality: copyright violations, unsourced
paragraphs, paragraphs with blatant POV, incomprehensible English, new
articles under a different name from an existing article, etc. The staff and
Campus Ambassador team in India have been working extremely hard to combat
these issues, and the English Wikipedia community at large has reverted or
warned students repeatedly, but the problem persists. The biggest challenge
is that the Online Ambassador team helping out India was just launched
recently and is currently very small (we have about 1,000 students in the
India program, but only about 30 Online Ambassadors dedicated to the India
program). The problems are so extreme that we've asked all students to stop
editing in the article namespace at this point and put any contributions
into sandboxes.
So we urgently need your help for the India students now. Much of the poor
content the students added in the last few months is already live on
Wikipedia, and some students might continue adding poor content onto
articles despite us telling them to edit only in sandboxes. Would you be
willing to go through a few students' contributions, or a whole class's
contributions, and delete any problematic material from the article
namespace? That means things like:
* Removing any plagiarized material (this is often easy to spot, as they've
cited the source they plagiarized from).
* Deleting articles that are duplications of existing articles.
* Moving any unsourced sentences to the talk page of the article or just
deleting them.
* Deleting or moving to the talk page any additions to Wikipedia that are so
poor English that they need serious editing help before they should be
on-wiki.
At this point, it's less mentoring and more cleaning up Wikipedia -- we need
swift action on removing problems from articles.
If you are willing and able to be part of this "Emergency India Ambassador
Team," please email me back immediately. We can use ALL the help we can get,
and we need help very urgently. Once you email me back, I will send you
exact details on which class(s) we need your help with and how exactly to
track student edits.
Thank you all very much. You all are doing amazingly as Ambassadors in the
U.S. program, and major thanks in advance to those of you who help out with
this more recent emergency.
Annie