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

[Swaroop Rao]

It used to be easier to spot copyvios on English Wikipedia earlier, but due
to some issues with Google, the bot which detected the copyvios (CorenBot)
is no longer running, though I have come to understand that Jimmy and Coren
are having talks with Google on this.

We used to have this mainspace-sandbox debate in the US Public Policy
program last semester, and we decided that the aim of the program was
students getting hands on community experience, and editing first in
sandbox will not give that kind of experience to students. However,
considering the massive problems we have had to face with India Education
Program this year, I think sandbox editing before going to mainspace would
work out well here. But a sandbox in a Chapter hosted wiki doesn't seem
right to me, because it is almost totally disconnected from the ground
realities at English Wikipedia. Also, editing on an enwiki sandbox will
enable better feedback from various sources (perhaps from more experienced
editors on enwiki), as opposed to a local sandbox, where feedback is only
from the selected pool of Online Ambassadors.


Swaroop Rao
(MikeLynch <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch>)

Steering committee member, United States Education Program




On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:28, Gautam John <gautam at prathambooks.org> wrote:

> 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
> ________
> http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html
>
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