On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:56, Hisham <hmundol(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
That's not accurate. The dates are as follows: It was concluded in all but 1 class
of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the assignements were
concluded.) It continues in 1 class at this college and at 1 class at the SNDT
Women's University. We asked College of Engineering Pune to stop the program in their
classrooms last week. It is still being continued at this college by 1 professor
nevertheless.
Probably the same could have been highlighted enough at Signpost. The signpost heading
conveys its closed down.
We had requested Signpost to amend it's heading.
At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management.
Well I cant help point CoEP where the director was much excited about the program and
without his push directly / indirectly, I wonder if 800+ students would have voluntarily
signed up. I will never agree if anyone says 800+ students voluntarily asked/agreed for
Wikipedia assignments without staff / whoever else asking them to do so.
True. However, even at CoEP, faculty were at liberty not to join the program (and indeed,
most of them chose not to.) However, the point made on the learnings ought to be taken in
conjunction with that of faculty involvement. Director buy-in is important but can only
compliment and not substitute for faculty involvement and capability. In the classes
where we have got better results than in others, this played a critical role.
I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters
Well it was my suggestion/opinion if you are planning next roll out in Jan. Odd semesters
in Indian colleges are longer ones July- Dec typically and give time for students / staff
to do extra things. Even semesters are shorter Jan-May (April in many cases) so the
duration for anything in colleges are limited in even sem. This is the reason why you will
find most extra-curriculars happening in odd-sem. I am not sure if we did a time audit of
the pilot, but it took very late to have students start editing and they were stopped
almost in 2-3 weeks. We may not have that much time to engage with students / faculty on
even semesters.
Ah, understood. That's an interesting and great point.
It is good to have CAs who have reasonable
experience in editing wikipedia.
Fully agree. Having said that, given the
relatively small community size in India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that
Campus Ambassadors need to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies. We
must however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward.
I would say make CAs as wikipedians with atleast 500+ edits on en.wiki to give them a
flavor of complexities in enwiki before they help out others. In other words, start early
on CA's get more commitment early on, that before they go ahead and
preach("teach") they practice("edit") enough.
I don't think anyone would suggest that CAs shouldn't edit more or understand
Wikipedia policies better. Having said that, the experience in the US suggested that
newbie CAs were as good as (and sometimes even better) than existing Wikipedians in the
role of CAs. (They hypothesis on this is that they were helping teach Wikipedia to
newbies - so they were able to calibrate and structure their messaging accordingly.) As I
said a sentence earlier, we do need to modify our selection, training and ongoing
development regime for CAs - but edit count alone might not be the only measure (though an
important one.)
hisham