I took some time last week and actually went through the "female" editors (many of the students openly identify their real names and/or genders) participating in class programs.

1) Most don't edit Wikipedia after the class is over - and this goes beyond gender. I determined this by studying their user contributions and also using a tool to examine contributions and gender for specific WikiProjects (specifically WP:Public art which developed as a program with students before the Campus Ambassador program existed)
2) A nice amount of them generally get slaps on the hand for their lack of understanding on "How Wikipedia Works"

I'm not sure if this means that something in the system is broken (i.e. we're not educating students and professors on how Wikipedia works write, we're not providing ongoing outreach - which seems to be a problem in a lot of areas of WP outreach...), that the students genuinely have no interest (and that's fine, they are "forced" to do it, after all), or what..

Some of these problems involve image deletion (due to lack of understanding on how fair use/copyright works in Wikipedia), article deletion, blocking of accounts, or just plain calling people out on their talk pages. I didn't gather all this information in a pile - I've looked at upwards of a thousand female editors accounts over the past two weeks - but, it's there, if you dig around a bit.

-Sarah

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud@fairpoint.net> wrote:
Help is needed.

Fred

--------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Issue of Copy-Pasting
From:    "Hisham" <hisham@wikimedia.org>
Date:    Fri, October 7, 2011 7:46 am
To:      "Wikipedia Ambassadors India"
<wikipedia-ambassadors-india@googlegroups.com>
        wikipedia-online-ambassadors@googlegroups.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Team

This problem is continuing and is fast approaching disaster proportions.
Please see these comments

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program#Queries_from_the_Wikipedia_community>
and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#Concerns_over_impact_on_article_quality>

Please urgently do the following

a) Constantly repeat to every student that copy-pasting is not acceptable
b) Monitor the work of your students - and make sure they edit in their
sandboxes before they go live (and only go live after you ok it.)
c) Please let's have the Campus & Online Ambassadors working closely with
each other to do point (b) and to track, monitor and correct the work of
your respective students.

In the next few days and weeks, the problem is going to explode unless we
control it because many students' deadlines are approaching.

Please treat this matter with the highest urgency.  The very future of
our program is at stake.

Many thanks.

hisham


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