[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

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.

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.

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.  I find a lot more can be done to
this "Findings and Learnings"[4].

It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia.

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, 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.


[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report
[3]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.html
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE
-- 
Regards
Srikanth.L
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