Our mails coincided, Srikanth, but my comments inline.
hisham
On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:10 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
Hi all,
If you are not aware of it yet, India Education Program Pilot died around a week back[1]
and a post mortem was done on Signpost[2]. I wonder if we Indians like to only rejoice
success's and keep silence when we fail. One could have acknowledged the death on this
list. It didnt happen. Bad.
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.
I am sad, guilty, angry all at the same time. I could not give more time for being an
"Online Ambassador". I thought role of an OA would be to help out people who are
reaching out for help, only to understand later OA needs to look what people are doing
edit by edit, reach out to them and help them. That is a lesson learnt for me. The program
has taught us many different lessons for each of us but are we too fast in race to pause
for a moment and analyze? Plans for next rollout is already ON[3], without doing enough
justice to large post-mortem. Am disappointed.
There is going to be a through analysis of this pilot. The links you are referring are not
plans for a rollout; they are just an invite to see if any existing community members in
other cities could invest the kind of time (during work hours and in classrooms) that
Campus Ambassadors need to do.
While large section of post mortem completely ignored one basic premise. "Quality of
Indian Students & Faculty". If you dont select only the interested / qualified
ones, we will fail again miserably, no matter how many ambassadors are there. Probably the
students in the program must be selected how ambassadors were selected in Pune and then
try the pilot with 20-30 *interested* students/faculty instead of heading to a college,
pushing through top management of College and making a failure out of IEP. Another thing
with colleges are "If you can't do in odd semester, you can't do it in even
semester". So I would suggest some detailed analysis before launching any further
programs.
At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management.
Having said that we should have looked at much lower student numbers.
I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters
I find a lot more can be done to this "Findings
and Learnings"[4].
Please do share your additional points. As I mentioned, it's very much work in
progress.
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.
Its MUST, not good to have. Infact this factor made
some OA, CA's from PPI feel bad on why they are ambassadors.
I personally don't believe that Indian culture had much bearing on this pilot. Some
students in India – as elsewhere – are either lazy and plagiarize or they genuinely
believe that close paraphrasing means something is no longer plagiarized.
Please get to close to reality Hisham,
As i mentioned in my mail, we are going to do am objective review of this and this will
inform the way forward.
Many of us went through college recently know its not
*Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the
brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. If IEP
continues to do "Marks for Wikipedia editing" campaign, we will fail again, only
consolation next time might be it would be easy to clean up since we would be cautious
with numbers. Also certain level of competence is required for article creation (or even
basic editing for that matter), I think we need to acknowledge it and shouldnt just be
going around with the notion "Everyone can edit" simply without adding a pinch
of Salt. WP:COMPETENCE[5] is not about subject matter expertise, its about Competence
required for Wikipedia editing, many of which cannot be practically expected from all
Indian students / Faculty.
There are many learnings and we will take all of them on board.