As a sysop, significant contributor and presently an avid observer on Kannada Wikipedia, I can say that it is true that the user activity has returned to pre-education programme levels within a month or faster than that. In fact, there has not been considerable increase in quality or momentum on par with organic growth despite CIS shelling close to 17 Lakh rupees (correct me if I'm wrong) - much of it constituting a percentage of Dr. U B Pavanaja's salary at CIS.
There have been tens of such events being announced in a nutshell and carried out without definitive impact.
What is more concerning is that the media reports (which is quite easy to get in this part of the world) being used to cover up the lack of definitive impact.
Perhaps we should hear more from the fellow Wikimedians who're neutral and friends on Kannada Wikipedia mailing list who're neutral to assess the actual impact than from CIS's partners (Christ College as on this thread, for instance).
On 20 May 2014 09:58, sankarshan foss.mailinglists@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:31 AM, Pavanaja U B pavanaja@vishvakannada.com wrote:
The very first email in this thread by Ravi had two main queries –one was about Tulu Wikipedia workshop and another one about Christ University project. I have answered both of them. Since both questions were asked in the same email, I answered both of them in same reply mail. Vikram also answered about the Christ University project. Complete report of CIS-A2K activities and outcome is available on meta and I am sure all the people
who
have been active in this thread have thoroughly gone through them. I
don’t
think we will be gaining anything more by doing further hair-splitting on this.
I am not entirely sure that the above is a correct summary of things. If < http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2014-May/011351.html
is the first email on the thread (from Ravishankar), then the points raised were:
[+] Section 1.3 of < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-10-02/News_a...
provides a set of observations in the form of "Lessons Learned"
[+] Ravishankar's point is that although the lessons were recorded, there are more instances where similar has occurred and lessons have not been implemented. To quote from that email "Yet, CIS seems to be repeating sich negligible impact outreach programs many times in March and April 2014. This includes Tulu workshops where there is active editor community at all."
I am not sure whether than phrase "Tulu workshops where there is active editor community at all" was meant to read as "no active editor community at all". Since no clarification or, amendments were provided, that line is kept dangling - but the reference to Tulu does not obvious ask for stats.
[+] The mail thereafter goes to cite http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaKN.htm which is a more broad update of the status/stats for Kannada and positions this in contrast to a news article < http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/wikipedia-taps...
.
The objective for the comparison is to provide data for the assertion that "when you look at Kannada Wikipedia stats, the user activity has returned to pre-education programme levels within a month".
In short, the original email, if that is the first on this thread, neither asked about Tulu and nor did it ask about the Christ University project.