On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:28 PM, Gautam John wrote:

Srikantha, thanks for posting this. I did not know about it till you
posted it and I am sure there are many like me. It is worrying but at
the same time offers us a chance to make things better for the future.

Apologies, Gautam, Srikanth and others, I ought to have posted the updates on the India mailing list too.


As I see it, the majority of the challenges have been around
plagiarism and copyright violations. (I wish we wouldn't conflate
these things - they aren't the same.)

Agree

There are multiple ways to solve
this - one is technology and the other one is the age old methods of
'capacity building' and 'sensitisation'. Question is, are the latter
two areas of work for the India Programs office because they aren't
short term or easy. A via-media is to run all submission through some
http://turnitin.com/ type system to check. Or maybe a hybrid - where
they don't edit on the mainspace but say on a sandbox run in India by,
perhaps, the Chapter and then they graduate? It's easy to overwhelm
the system when so many students sign up - a ladder of evolution in to
a Wikipedia editor might help. As might the idea of pairing/twining
either the students together (they check each other) or student with
current editor (which may have already failed).

All valid suggestions and we will consider them all in our analysis of what went wrong and how/if we can do things better going forward.


 that's needed but some honesty and vulnerability to learn,
accept and act on the feedback.

Absolutely, Gautam, and that's exactly how we will approach this.

hisham