On 12 November 2011 18:55, Swaroop Rao <raul.swaroop(a)gmail.com> wrote: Fair enough. Just that at the scale the India program will run at, a technology solution might very well be a easier first step than human interventions. Quite possibly correct. Just wondering about it in terms of DMCA liability for the WMF and more. Thank you. Best, Gautam ________ http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:55 PM, Swaroop Rao wrote: Maybe if we had limited the numbers to much lower than we had in Pune, and with a larger number of Campus Ambassadors from the very beginning, and with the full compliment of Online Ambassadors from the very beginning, and with select faculty, (and with a whole host of other learnings), the sandbox route could also have been made to work in Pune. ...but I'm going ahead of myself because we are still analysing the results. My (personal) opinion is I agree with you on this. hisham

Iv used turnitin during my MBA and can say that Iv seen people upload their projects there, note where the software catches them, change the language in that part and re-submit. People will go to any lengths .. Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:33:12 +0530 From: sodabottle(a)gmail.com To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail *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. +1. with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now) So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved. Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page !!!!. Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour. So here is what is to be done: 1) Keep the number low - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide blanket programs. Make this a "interested students only" program. We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more. We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. 2) Penalise those who copy paste - either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. 3) The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:33, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's true. The enwiki community is losing its patience really. A bit harder to enforce, since academic plagiarism is practised en masse by many professors themselves (not generalizing, just saying that the problem goes way deeper than the students). Steering Committee member, United States Education Program

On Nov 12, 2011, at 8:04 PM, Swaroop Rao wrote: Actually, my view is that many colleges (regardless of stream) have the structural flexibility to accommodate a program like this. To illustrate, there is (in most cases) an option for class assignments (marked or otherwise) to be determined by the faculty (sometimes independently and sometimes after getting the approval of the Director and / or an academic council of some kind.) Event those affiliated to Pune University, for instance, had this kind of flexibility. We do need to look at what kind of streams we should look at it. Another learning for instance is that a first year engineering student ends up (in many cases) being taught basic fundamentals - which are either well covered on Wikipedia or on which it is difficult to put in a meaningful entry. A 3rd year arts/humanities student does not have this particular problem - but sometimes are more concerned by placements / admissions than academic endeavors. My point being that we need to look at the results of the pilot and then establish patterns which can help evaluate the pilot and inform the way forward. hisham

hi, It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point. First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also speak to the Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs have the benefit of their "experience". The same also goes to the India Programs team that initiated this project. I think others have raised a few valid points regarding experience of the CA, the number of people that a CA can manage and what a CA was supposed to do and ended up doing. warm regards, Pradeep Mohandas

Hey all, I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge. The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many of my friends get the feel of it too. These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country. - Arjun On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara <sonara.arnav(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: -- - Arjun

On Nov 13, 2011, at 12:07 AM, Swaroop Rao wrote: Agree with you fully, and as I mentioned earlier, we will approach the assessment of the pilot and the way forward objectively, comprehensively and dispassionately. hisham

On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara wrote: Agreed. hisham

On Nov 12, 2011, at 10:39 PM, Pradeep Mohandas wrote: Absolutely. Absolutely. hisham

On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote: My view is not driven by political correctness but I do want to avoid generalising all students and all faculty. Just take a look a the user talk and article discussion pages and it's immediately apparent that quite a few students and teachers wouldn't deserve blame. Many students did make mistakes - but they made the same mistakes that many newbies. Agree and we need to work on how we select the colleges and faculty and classes and students. This is something that can (and should) be led by the faculty. Some teachers have shown the way on how this can be done. Clearly the student:CA ratio needs to be reduced significantly. ...but did you mean students:CA 5:1 or 1:5? That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that an editor (in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article. It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would improve it or point out issues. One of the aspects that the better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the global editing community. hisham

I couldn't have said it better Bala. Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch>) On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 16:39, Bala Jeyaraman &lt;sodabottle(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote: We had requested Signpost to amend it's heading. 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. Ah, understood. That's an interesting and great point. 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