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

[Arnav Sonara]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle at gmail.com>wrote:

> >>*we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly
> speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without
> that coordination chances of success are quite low.  *
> *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if
> Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached
> them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story
> but even you were a part of this sinking ship.*
>
> Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and
> apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is.  I had no clue the OA role
> involved going through every edit and do the student's work.  IEPs mails
> did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's
> homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.
>
> So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the
> PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer
> editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue
> of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what
> OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the
> students.  (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in
> both programs - MikeLynch).
>

There it is, even CA's are not expected to keep a check on each and every
article, that is not even possible. Instead we were expecting them to come
forward and ask us or anyone their questions and queries and doubts.

Few did come and few didn't. Now the number of students who didn't come
ahead and ask questions was quite high. So Hisham did tell us that you all
go and ask students what is the problem they are facing.

And then being a CA we tried our best to get in touch with every student to
start editing, and later to stop copy pasting. If the students are not
coming forward, we were asked to go to them, but the number was quite big.

Now "if there is a crazy guy, there is a crazy guy" we or in fact no one
can do anything about it. There were number of instances where few students
were repeatedly copy pasting stuff or creating havoc on Wiki. It is not
that we didn't warn them or let them do, we wrote on talk pages, mailed
them, contacted on facebook, and also got in touch with them physically on
ground and explained them and also raised this issue with relevant
professors. Some of them understood, and some of them continued
disruptions. So there was no way we could control them.

And why exactly do you need "Indian" community to help?. The newbie editors
> were getting plenty of help from the global community.  You dont need a
> specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what to do and
> what not to do.  A student who doesnt listen to "Do not copy paste"
> instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the
> instruction came from an Indian editor.
>

Yes, we didn't want any specific nationality editor. That is what even we
are saying, if a student doesn't listen to A administrator, he won't even
listen to B admin.

But personally even I felt bad when certain Users from abroad questioned
the education system and quality of Indian standards, and there was an
instance where a User crossed the line and created this Sub
Page<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:DexDor/IEP_status&diff=454936076&oldid=454917314>
,
thus we tried to tackle it also by posting a
Message<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DexDor#User:DexDor.2FIEP_status_2>
on
his talk page too. This is where I think the lack of communication with
Indian Community lead us to. And we do accept that there was some serious
lack in communication with community, and by community I mean both local
and global.


One point to note here that out of 40 selected CAs(Gen 1 & 2) only 30 are
>> active and out of those 30 only 20 track/follow and reach out students, so
>> in short we need more involvements for the dormant CAs.
>>
>
Here. I would like to differ with numbers, still we need involvement of as
many CAs as we can. I think the number of CAs doing actual work is still
less. We need to improve on this too.




-- 
Thanks
Arnav (ricku).
(User:Rangilo_Gujarati) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati>
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