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

[Bala Jeyaraman]

Sue,

>>*A number
of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My
understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except
for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious
problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team
couldn't get resolved.*

The project has not been "mostly successful" by any measure.  There were
only three schools in the program - of them one (SNDT)  has only one class
of 10. The rest came from the College of enginering Pune (COEP) and the
symbiosis school of economics (SSE) . Both produced huge amounts of
copyvio. On Nov 2, Hisham went to COEP to shut down (or postpone it for a
month, whatever happened). But SSE students continue to edit (and produce
more copy vios) till now.

A program, that has wasted tens of thousands of manhours of hundreds of
regular wiki editors cant be called "successful" by any stretch of
imagination. It is a an abject and complete failure.

Please do not call this a "success" and ignore the havoc it has wrought on
en wiki. As long as the foundation and program refuses to acknowledge the
truth, there is little chance of any lessons being learnt.






On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 13 November 2011 08:46, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is,
> >> about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to
> >> contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all
> of
> >> them editing the articles on the same topic.
> >>
> > This is related to something I've been thinking about.
> >
> > As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were
> > about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and
> about
> > having fun while learning.
>
>
> Hi Bishakha,
>
> This is a bit of a derail from your e-mail, but I wanted to clarify
> your use of the past tense (they *were* about contributing). I think
> the thread title here may be creating some confusion about what has
> actually happened. That, or else I may be confused myself :-)
>
> The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion
> of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP,
> the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over:
> contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't "died." A number
> of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My
> understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except
> for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious
> problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team
> couldn't get resolved.
>
> The plagiarism problems were serious, and after their efforts to fix
> them didn't work, Hisham and Barry shut down that stream of the
> project. It was a hard decision to make, but I expect there's general
> agreement that it was the right decision. But the project itself is
> not over. Although, the pilot phase might be over: I'm not sure about
> that.
>
> I'm just clarifying this point because I think it would be good for
> everybody here to have the same basic understanding of what happened.
> And if I'm wrong, somebody might please just correct me :-)
>
> Thanks,
> Sue
>
>
>
>
> --
> Sue Gardner
> Executive Director
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
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