Dear Bala,
we dont want "kids", who will "mess up" by "drawing mangoes and bananas" here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly.
*All I can say is that *EVERY KING WAS ONCE A CRYING BABY*. Remember the day when you created your account on wikipedia. With all due respect to your edit count at present and your current status at wiki, you were also a KID on wikipedia at that day. A KID who has grown up now and understands wikipedia well enough.
Same is the case with IEP students. Mastering wikipedia and coming to terms with it is not a cakewalk. The students are learning from their mistakes.
As far as the Campus Ambassadors are concerned, yes there were a few inactive ones. But there were also many CA's who put their heart and souls into the program. Ram is one of them. In my opinion, judging a person's knowledge about wikipedia by his edit count is not at all fair!
I would request you not to get personal. No doubt you are crossing the limits, even you know that.
And for everyone who is following this thread, IEP is not dead for sure! It's just that it met with an accident, got deeply wounded. Doctors are doing their job.
IEP will be back - stronger and healthier !
Thanks, Pratik Lahoti. CA, CoEP.
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 1:08 PM, < wikimediaindia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot (Erik Moeller)
- Re: Let's *Talk* (Erik Moeller)
- Re: Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot (Ram Shankar Yadav)
Message: 1 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:07:23 -0800 From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot To: Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAEg6ZHntaj3J+m-Ws8ccWRrpPt0vR2dHsH6ZnLdmjFoV4ErA2w@mail.gmail.com
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On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
This sums up the problem of the IEP -? designed by people clueless about
how
en wiki works and run by "campus ambassadors" who view wikipedia as a
giant
sandbox to play with students.
Speaking of playing in sandboxes, just for you, a nice shallow blog post that applies:
http://www.smallact.com/blog/3-keys-to-playing-nicely-in-the-social-media-sa...
Enjoy the sand, Erik -- Erik M?ller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Message: 2 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:38:09 -0800 From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Let's *Talk* To: Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAEg6ZH=hptDAZRq2=et19whrcPAP=Zkrbuaxy8-h9FvE5YcM+w@mail.gmail.com
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Well said, Hisham, Srikeit at al. Nobody's asking for rah-rah excitement. Being dispassionate and critical is the goal. Being hostile and dickish is unhelpful -- there's no possible useful end that could serve.
So: If you're adding more heat than light to a conversation, please don't join the conversation. If you're attacking others and calling into question their legitimacy in being here, without them having violated any of the ground rules of good faith behavior, you begin violating those norms yourself. Calm down, have a tea, and read some good poetry (or write it, if you're truly suffering :-).
At WMF, we'd be completely happy to abandon the Global Education Program model altogether if it turned out to be a failure, and we'd be happy to abandon it for India or other countries if it turned out to be a failure there. Nobody wants to spend $$$ and blood/sweat equity (the only type that exists in nonprofits) on stuff that isn't achieving its intended impact.
So far, however, what I've seen is a very successful US initiative followed by an India pilot which has encountered very serious, deep challenges with contribution quality. The analysis that I've seen so far really suggests that what it comes down to is abject contribution quality by lots of the participating students and a routine pattern of copyright infringement (and I would label it plagiarism if they're not identifying the source). Let me know if I got that wrong.
That sucks, but if so, that's a problem that needs to be named to be tackled in a serious fashion. No amount of tweaking the program parameters would have solved the issues of the scale and type that have been pointed out. This goes to the fundamentals.
And - to stay with the sandbox metaphor from another thread - if the majority of contributors to a university-based program in India can reach won't be able to contribute at an acceptable quality in WP proper, then perhaps it's also time to think about more aggressive sandboxing of contributions early in the game, at least when we're dealing with a course where we either don't know what to expect, or we _do_ based on experiences like the one to date. Possibly even using an external sandbox.
Lastly, let's not forget that we haven't made any determination as to what the best methods are to gain, and keep, great new contributors in India (or elsewhere, for that matter). We can, and should, continue to experiment with many different approaches, including some of the suggestions that have been made in previous threads.
All the energy, including the occasional flamewar, that I'm seeing here really speaks tons to the strengths of the India community as a whole. Energy, creativity, intelligence and healthy tension are the ingredients of success, not failure.
Srikeit, I'll unfortunately miss your talk on Saturday as I'll be at the hackathon. But I look forward to hearing about it and hopefully catching up on Friday. :-) -- Erik M?ller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Message: 3 Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:08:21 +0530 From: Ram Shankar Yadav ramshankaryadav@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot To: Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CABUU066+kCEk6fXkKEVFgbv-T1KvDag_UMaTk+78qx5-ZUgnUw@mail.gmail.com
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*This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want "kids", who will "mess up" by "drawing mangoes and bananas" here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly.*
*- *First of all stop playing those policy games, before looking at [[WP:COMPETENCE]] I would rather say to have a look at [[WP:DONTBITE]].
*But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a "campus ambassador" with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?. *
- Dude you are getting personal here, I respect you obsession with numbers
but the whole idea of a "campus ambassador" is to help others to edit, instead of writing articles for edit count. You just took one number and creating all the fuss but you ignored others like ...
Total Edits :705 (in last 5 months) Article 49 7.09% Talk 6 0.87% *User 185 26.77%* *User talk 238 34.44%* *Wikipedia 144 20.84%* Wikipedia talk 26 3.76% Template 37 5.35% Help 6 0.87%
For more stats :
http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Ramshankaryadav&la...
Apart from the numbers we got the experience of personally touching 1000+ students and interacting with Faculty and Directors, which you can not do by siting and editing Wikipedia in your living room. I'm not a 14000+ editor like you but I share the same philosophy of free knowledge, but instead of respecting us you are doing all the mud throwing, it's not acceptable at all!!
*This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by "campus ambassadors" who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students.*
- You are crossing your limits here, we have repeatedly accepted our faults
but this is too much, we tried something new things, and few worked few didn't by it doesn't gives you the authority to say whatever you like to! Instead of coming up with "How we can make it better" you are more into the mode of "You did it wrong"!.
~Ram
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle@gmail.com
wrote:
-* If Hisham and Nitika were clueless why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing when you are starting
something
new don't expect people will start reaching you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that "we are here to help you,
and
it's going to be great learning experience". Tell me how many times did
you
reached out to students, even if you did and they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps.
*I remember doing this exactly on Oct 12 office hours. Here is the transcript snippet which srikanth has provided in the earlier mail. Again you are demonstrating your ignorance about what an OA role is.
Oct 12 15:34:32 <srikanthlogic> but i was on IRC, got only one help req
in a whole week, my talk page was untouched. I am ready to help if people reach out :) Oct 12 15:35:33 <Hmundol> srikanthlogic & soda bottle : yes, i know
that
more students ought to be reaching out but sometimes they don't even
know
the mistake they are committing so don't reach out. ?what the Campus Ambassadors have been doing i s proactively going to contrib histories
and
checking in. ?unfortunately, that seems to the only way that it's
worked.
*.*
- *First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping
someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the
kid
will learn by doing mistakes eventually.
This is exactly the kind of cluelessness i am referring to. The [[WP:COMPETENCE]] exists exactly for this purpose - we dont want "kids", who will "mess up" by "drawing mangoes and bananas" here. We want atleast semi competent, interested people who can act responsibly.
But then, i should expect this general cluelessness and ignorance from a "campus ambassador" with a grand total of 41 mainspace edits?.
This sums up the problem of the IEP - designed by people clueless about how en wiki works and run by "campus ambassadors" who view wikipedia as a giant sandbox to play with students.
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Ashwin Baindur <
ashwin.baindur@gmail.com
wrote:
We have had a lot of responses and recriminations on this issue. In the light of all that has happened, please let us stop our grousing. Hisham
has
opened a new thread, and accepted full responsibility. That is the end
of
the blame-game as far as anybody is concerned. All of us are inviolved
and
all of us are both innocent and blameworthy, including and especially
me. I
know I should have done more.
Let us bring this thread to a close. Let all posts now be in response to his new thread only and couched in positive terms and offering useful suggestions or fresh input.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Ram Shankar Yadav < ramshankaryadav@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Bala,
*"Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue
the OA
role involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs mails did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never
signed
up."*
- We are not putting blame on anyone. If Hisham and Nitika were
clueless
why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more
thing
when you are starting something new don't expect people will start
reaching
you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith
that
"we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning
experience".
Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you
did and
they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this environment just help them to take baby steps.
*It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both
programs
- MikeLynch).*
- First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping
someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job
for
you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that
the kid
will learn by doing mistakes eventually.
*Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a
helpful
Q&A page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude,
Spiff
quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right
then and
there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.*
- Accept my apologies for not able to recall few Indian Admins who
tired
to help us, but if you see the big picture, the whole scene was
dominated
by editors from abroad. We needed your help and support when these
folks
were pointing fingers on Indian Education System. One more thing,
after the
first few instances of copyvios we reached out in person and took 35+ sessions in various classes but even after putting that effort few of
them
kept doing the copy-paste for last minute submissions.
*And why exactly do you need "Indian" community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.* *- *By "Indian" community I mean people like you and me and others you are either reading or replying this thread, guys we surely needed your support at the forefront.
We never denied the fact that we have failed in certain areas but that doesn't mean that overall program is a failure or dead.
We believe in learning from our mistakes and happy to do new ones to learn better.
Cheers, Ram
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle@gmail.com
wrote:
>*we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly
speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. * *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you
approached
them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure
story
but even you were a part of this sinking ship.*
Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is. I had no clue the
OA role
involved going through every edit and do the student's work. IEPs
mails
did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the
student's
homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.
So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of
volunteer
editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an
issue
of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt
know what
OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students. (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA
in
both programs - MikeLynch).
>,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator
came forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc
Another wrong fact. An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to point Hisham and group in the right direction in early september when things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl, where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a
helpful
Q&A page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude,
Spiff
quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right
then and
there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.
And why exactly do you need "Indian" community to help?. The newbie editors were getting plenty of help from the global community. You
dont
need a specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what
to do
and what not to do. A student who doesnt listen to "Do not copy
paste"
instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the instruction came from an Indian editor.
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Ram Shankar Yadav < ramshankaryadav@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 Srikanth!
Hey Folks!
I'm Ram and I'm one of the CA's worked closely with CoEP and SSE. I would like to share my views on this most discussed topic, coz the
term
"FAIL" is quite thought provoking, and now everyone has an opinion
and I
respect that.
As a Campus Ambassador(CA) we faced the heat on ground and nobody can feel the pain like us when we heard the discontinuation of IEP in
CoEP coz
we gave our personal time physically and virtually in every possible
way to
make this program a success, and I promise we'll keep doing that.
My views on IEP:
- *Wikipedia India Education Program(IEP) for a CA* : The whole idea
of this program like everyone knows is to get more editors, but we
have our
own set of challenges in the age of Facebook. What a bunch of CAs
have done
in as short span of 5 months can't be done in a couple of months by existing Community(local or global), coz we touched the
students(1000+)
personally, we had the experience of interactions with Faculty and Directors.
Our only aim was to tell them(students) that Wikipedia is "cool", and indeed we did that! in the way we taught wikipedia to them. Few
things
which we tell our students in our Wiki Sessions:
- Writing on Wikipedia will give you global audience, 400 million
unique visitors
- It will improve your Writing, Critical Thinking
and Collaborative skills
- It will add a bullet point to your resume and hence better
placements
- Lastly it will also give you marks if you follow the given
deadlines
Yes, I agree that we have seen setback coz of the copyvios, but I totally agree with Srikanth coz this was due to the scale and
numbers.
- *Faculty Involvement* : It is one of the weak link in IEP, though
they knew the importance of this program, but they have their own
set of
obligations/mindset, and we always felt that not all the faculty
members
are tracking the students and their articles. We have some exemplary
Profs
who are so much involved that they reached every student's talk page
and
wrote message on it, and on the other side few never opened the
course page
itself!
Lesson for us is to enroll only those who are really interested and track them as well, drop the course if they are not putting effort as required, but this scenario was different 6 months back, coz no one
knew
about this program, and yes we did enrolled a few inactive faculty
coz they
showed interest but never lived up to the expectation.
- *Online Ambassadors* : As Hisham already told that we got very
late engagement of our OAs in this program as well as the OA
expectation
issue, we never got the support which was required from an OA.
Honestly
speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without that coordination chances of success are quite low. My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you
approached
them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure
story
but even you were a part of this sinking ship.
- *India Community* : We really missed you throughout this program,
I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came
forward
and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc. We don't bifurcate among
community
and we never taught our students that only Indian community will
help, our
aim was to make their "collaborative" skill better instead of
creating a
division among the community. For my fellow Indian Wiki Community, folks we would love to hear from you and surely need your help and support in future.
- *Global Community* : Firstly I would say "Thank you" to them for
teaching the harsh lessons but we really liked the way you guys
supported
us. Yes, I know few folks who always crib and do the mud throwing on
this
program and it's implementation, but I know folks who have helped
writing
great articles, reviewing them and event doing copy-editing and
cleaning.
We need to surely communicate better with them in future.
- *Campus Ambassadors*: The best thing that happen to me coz of IEP
is I found great friends who share the same philosophy of free
knowledge.
We gave our personal time not only in taking session but also
training new
bunch of CAs and helping students in every possible way.
We were the face of Wikipedia on campus and we love it! Like Srikanth said yes we were overloaded coz of the number of students per CA was very large still we did our bit to help every
students
by either reaching out personally and virtually. One point to note here that out of 40 selected CAs(Gen 1 & 2) only 30 are active and out of those 30 only 20 track/follow and reach out
students,
so in short we need more involvements for the dormant CAs.
- *Students* : We found good and bad students, student I know has
written a GA and I also know a student who in-spite of several
warnings by
phone/mail and personal visits they kept copy-paste! Between the two extremes there are folks who failed few times but did learned from
it and
had become great editors.
All in all the learning here is to, assess the level of students
based
on their skill(writing especially) and their educational
background(rural
or urban). Also we need to teach them the most important thing, NOT
TO COPY
PASTE!!!, from the very first day of the wiki sessions.
*Summary*: We are challenging the status quo by bringing a new way of learning and teaching things and have learned some essential lessons
for
making this program a success in future. I would personally request
my
fellow Wikipedians to keep a faith on us and support us in every
possible
way coz *"helping hands are better than praying lips"*.
Let's make this world a better place!
Cheers, Ram
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan < srik.lak@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 20:15, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote: > >> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Nitika <ntandon@wikimedia.org
wrote:
>> > I would also like to share with you all some of the good articles >>> that students have written. >>> >> > Nitika, please use right terms from next time, "Good articles" mean > entirely different thing in Wikipedia. http://enwp.org/WP:GA > > >> Robinson Crusoe Economy<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe_Economy%3E
>> -Another redirect, 'economy' is in
lower-case.
> > > Theo, > You got it wrong on that alone to best of my knowledge, probably you > did it too fast. Its probably the lone GA which got churned out of
the
> program and we could call it a lone success among several other
things.
> Wish that editor continues wiki editing. > > -- > Regards > Srikanth.L > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimediaindia-l mailing list > Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l > >
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Pratik,
//*All I can say is that EVERY KING WAS ONCE A CRYING BABY. Remember the day when you created your account on wikipedia. With all due respect to your edit count at present and your current status at wiki, you were also a KID on wikipedia at that day. A KID who has grown up now and understands wikipedia well enough.
Same is the case with IEP students. Mastering wikipedia and coming to terms with it is not a cakewalk. The students are learning from their mistakes.
As far as the Campus Ambassadors are concerned, yes there were a few inactive ones. But there were also many CA's who put their heart and souls into the program. Ram is one of them. In my opinion, judging a person's knowledge about wikipedia by his edit count is not at all fair!
I would request you not to get personal. No doubt you are crossing the limits, even you know that.
And for everyone who is following this thread, IEP is not dead for sure! It's just that it met with an accident, got deeply wounded. Doctors are doing their job.
IEP will be back - stronger and healthier !//
All Wikipedias face vandals, trolls and genuinely interested newbies everyday. That is not a problem and part of the growth. It can be managed because the rate of such newcomers is manageable by the existing number of admins. Also, genuinely interested newbie's rate of errors will be much less and they usually correct themselves.
But, if you are designing a program to systematically upload content, a lot of care has to be taken an no excuse can be given. No community can easily cleanup such a systematic mess. I can see lot of emotional attachment for the people attached to this IEP project. Please do also remember that a Wikipedia projects is also very dear for its community. If you can't help them, at least don't add to their burden.
The same thing happened with Tamil Wikipedia when Google created a lot of trash in the name of helping Indian languages. We are still cleaning that mess. I can very well understand the frustration of the en wiki community which spends so much time cleaning.
*Wikipedia is a very organic community. Unless the programs from WMF or any other organization don't understand and adapt to this, they will neither be sustainable or scalable. *
I recommend all Wikipedia communities to take a no-nonsense approach to all programs that use them as a testing ground. Volunteer's time are more valuable.
Ravi
Corrected:
*Wikipedia is a very organic community. Unless the programs from WMF or any other organization understand and adapt to this, they can be sustained or scaled.*
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