I've noticed this kind of problem with students in other class projects. The students tend to view the professor as the only relevant authority figure, and disregard messages from other people (or worse, can't understand those messages). People who aren't familiar with wiki tend to view online communications in terms of email: most of the email messages you receive are spam and just need to be ignored or deleted.
First thing that needs to be done is to figure out who the teacher or professor is. All professors should be directed to [[Wikibooks:Guidelines for class projects]], and they should also likely sign in at [[Wikibooks:List of class projects]]. This way we can keep track of the projects in a centralized way, and we can list who exactly is the professor so future communications towards that book can be addressed appropriately.
We can help teach these groups the correct way to do things, but if they continue to upload copyvio images, they need to be blocked like any other user. Blocking a student, especially when there is a grade on the line, will certainly get people to pay more attention to our warnings. Such action may also prompt a professor to step forward and ask "what do we need to do to fix this?"
I have some experiance with other group projects like this. I'll try my damndest to get in touch with them ASAP and correct the problems.
--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)
From: Iamunknown iamunknown@gmail.com Reply-To: Wikimedia textbook discussion textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Textbook-l] Class projects Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:39:22 -0600
We have three ongoing class projects which most of you probably already know about: Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education, The Computer Revolution, and Ethnomedicine. I have posted notes on the individual contributor's pages repeatedly particularly about image use, but I get nothing even such as a reply. How can we get in contact with these contributors? Or, how can we get in contact with their group leader, professor, or whomever is in charge? They need to know about copyrights relating to images. I ended up removing all the untagged images I found in Ethnomedicine, left (hopefully) kind notes on the uploaders pages referring them to Commons (where I found related free images in all but one case), and have gotten no reply. I'm flustered right now and cannot really think straight. Any ideas about where to go from here?
-Iamunknown
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