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

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 23:27, 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).
>

I explicitly mentioned in office hours that it should be students who ought
to be reaching out, not the other way. Please tell me does any of your
college profs come to your desks/home and see if you write your assignment?
It was clearly the students responsibility to reach out for help, and they
failed in it. Period.

Oct 12 15:34:32 <srikanthlogic> but i was on IRC, got only one help req in
> a whole week, my talk page was untouched. I am ready to help if people
> reach out :)
>  Oct 12 15:35:33 <Hmundol> srikanthlogic & soda bottle : yes, i know that
> more students ought to be reaching out but sometimes they don't even know
> the mistake they are committing so don't reach out. …what the Campus
> Ambassadors have been doing i s proactively going to contrib histories and
> checking in. …unfortunately, that seems to the only way that it's worked.


>>,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came
> forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc
>
> *
> Another wrong fact.  An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to
> point Hisham and  group in the right direction in early september when
> things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl,
> where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful
> Q&A page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff
> quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and
> there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.
>

Poor editing, I raised the flag earlier once in the detailed FAQ page
prepared by Spiff[2] which is mentioned above and then first office hours.
But then copyvios was the bigger focus, MoS had no time. When students
could not get "do not copy", I would wonder they would get detailed MoS
(which I agree takes little time / proficiency in English, which I doubt I
would have had it during my college days)  I stopped writing on talk pages
of students voluntarily after I got very little response. Unfortunately I
had too many other things to do than to write on non-responsive students'
talk pages for which I repented at the start of my post in the original
thread.

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2011-10-12
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SpacemanSpiff/S3/IEP/FAQ

-- 
Regards
Srikanth.L
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