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

[Gautam John]

On 12 November 2011 18:10, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Srikantha, thanks for posting this. I did not know about it till you
posted it and I am sure there are many like me. It is worrying but at
the same time offers us a chance to make things better for the future.

As I see it, the majority of the challenges have been around
plagiarism and copyright violations. (I wish we wouldn't conflate
these things - they aren't the same.) There are multiple ways to solve
this - one is technology and the other one is the age old methods of
'capacity building' and 'sensitisation'. Question is, are the latter
two areas of work for the India Programs office because they aren't
short term or easy. A via-media is to run all submission through some
http://turnitin.com/ type system to check. Or maybe a hybrid - where
they don't edit on the mainspace but say on a sandbox run in India by,
perhaps, the Chapter and then they graduate? It's easy to overwhelm
the system when so many students sign up - a ladder of evolution in to
a Wikipedia editor might help. As might the idea of pairing/twining
either the students together (they check each other) or student with
current editor (which may have already failed).

Either way, I agree - it isn't a post-mortem (it's such a gruesome
word!) that's needed but some honesty and vulnerability to learn,
accept and act on the feedback.

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
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