On 13-Nov-2011, at 4:07 PM, Bishakha Datta wrote:
I'm hoping we'll hear more about the successes
of the project, and eventually come to a balanced understanding of what worked and what
didn't.
At this stage, we're hearing much more about what didn't work, so it's hard
to assess the pilot meaningfully.
Thanks for bringing this up Bishakha. I do agree with you - like any other thing IEP has
had its own set of highs and lows, ups and downs, failures and successes. I wanted to
provide a more holistic view and share some analysis that I have done about IEP to see
what worked during the pilot and what did not.
Successes
Our brilliant army of Campus Ambassadors who have voluntarily put in extra hours of work
than they'd been asked to when they'd applied for Campus Ambassador Program.
Several in-class sessions, copyvio sessions, co-ordinating with faculty, actively going
from student to student and solving their queries, organizing regular CA meet ups/faculty
meet ups, going through articles students have written, helping students understand how to
do praphrasing and the list goes on and on. No matter what the circumstances were and no
matter how busy they were there were always couple of CAs who would actively volunteer for
the work that was required to be done. They have put their heart and soul in the program
and would like to thank each one of them for all their efforts and dedication towards the
program!
A lot of students who have been actively editing additional articles 'besides the ones
on which they'll be graded'. These students are genuinely interested in Wiki
editing and have written some very good articles. Just to add, these students understand
the consequences of plagiarism and who knows, these newbies might turn into long term
wikipedians.
I would also like to share with you all some of the good articles that students have
written. I feel in the midst of all the copyvio chaos we have not congratulated students
who have done brilliant work on wikipedia:
Challenges of Inflationary Policy In India
Private_sector_banks_in_India
Innovations_in_the_Indian_banking_system
Credit_Control
Commercial_paper_in_India
Indian_money_market
Risk_management_in_Indian_banks
Monetary_policy_of_India
Loan waiver
All_India_Financial_Institutions
Non-banking_Financial_Company
economic_survey
Public_Private_Partnership_in_India
Public_float
Finance_in_India
Foreign_Exchange_Management_Act
Public_sector_banks_in_India
Robinson Crusoe Economy
Human Capital
Land acquisition in India
Partial equilibrium
Labour Discrimination
Testing high-performance computing applications
Test Data Generation
Testing in data mining applications
Applications of Stack
Double-ended priority queue
Constructor(Object-oriented programming)
These are just few of the articles. And as you'll notice not only have these students
written good articles they have also contributed in great way by adding Indian content on
wiki.
Failures (and while pointing out the failures, I'd also like to address some concerns
raised by specific people in this mail trail)
There is no denying that our lack of communication with the global wikipedia community
would be the biggest failure.
Initially when we had approached the OAs we'd thought that their role will be similar
(if not the same) to the OAs involved in PPI. But because of several other issues
(students adding plagiarized material, low quality content etc) we had to start with the
clean up project and hence the role of OAs also changed. I think this change of role
caused some confusion for the OAs. So Bala/ Surya, I note your point here going forward we
have to have more effective communication with the OAs and the entire OA Program should be
designed and monitored in a better fashion.
Accepting some of the inexperienced Wikipedians to become OAs. However we recognized our
mistake well in time and got more experienced wikipedians as OAs ( OAs who were actively
involved in PPI).
As Swaroop/Arnav rightly said, we'll have to branch out to other subject streams. It
was really difficult for first year engineering students (who were still studying the
basics of engineering) to pick up topics on which they could write wikipedia articles
because most of those articles were very well covered.
Not briefing students about plagiarism and copyvios during the initial in-class sessions.
Going forward, we have to make sure that students are taught about this topic in detail.
Arnav, Arjun, Swaroop et all - I agree with you! IEP is not dead. The program faced its
own set of challenges and we've learnt a lot out of this pilot. We're still
studying the trends, our mistakes, our successes and we'll share our evaluation with
you all sometime soon.
Thanks
Nitika