Well said, Hisham, Srikeit at al. Nobody's asking for rah-rah
excitement. Being dispassionate and critical is the goal. Being
hostile and dickish is unhelpful -- there's no possible useful end
that could serve.
So: If you're adding more heat than light to a conversation, please
don't join the conversation. If you're attacking others and calling
into question their legitimacy in being here, without them having
violated any of the ground rules of good faith behavior, you begin
violating those norms yourself. Calm down, have a tea, and read some
good poetry (or write it, if you're truly suffering :-).
At WMF, we'd be completely happy to abandon the Global Education
Program model altogether if it turned out to be a failure, and we'd be
happy to abandon it for India or other countries if it turned out to
be a failure there. Nobody wants to spend $$$ and blood/sweat equity
(the only type that exists in nonprofits) on stuff that isn't
achieving its intended impact.
So far, however, what I've seen is a very successful US initiative
followed by an India pilot which has encountered very serious, deep
challenges with contribution quality. The analysis that I've seen so
far really suggests that what it comes down to is abject contribution
quality by lots of the participating students and a routine pattern of
copyright infringement (and I would label it plagiarism if they're not
identifying the source). Let me know if I got that wrong.
That sucks, but if so, that's a problem that needs to be named to be
tackled in a serious fashion. No amount of tweaking the program
parameters would have solved the issues of the scale and type that
have been pointed out. This goes to the fundamentals.
And - to stay with the sandbox metaphor from another thread - if the
majority of contributors to a university-based program in India can
reach won't be able to contribute at an acceptable quality in WP
proper, then perhaps it's also time to think about more aggressive
sandboxing of contributions early in the game, at least when we're
dealing with a course where we either don't know what to expect, or we
_do_ based on experiences like the one to date. Possibly even using an
external sandbox.
Lastly, let's not forget that we haven't made any determination as to
what the best methods are to gain, and keep, great new contributors in
India (or elsewhere, for that matter). We can, and should, continue to
experiment with many different approaches, including some of the
suggestions that have been made in previous threads.
All the energy, including the occasional flamewar, that I'm seeing
here really speaks tons to the strengths of the India community as a
whole. Energy, creativity, intelligence and healthy tension are the
ingredients of success, not failure.
Srikeit, I'll unfortunately miss your talk on Saturday as I'll be at
the hackathon. But I look forward to hearing about it and hopefully
catching up on Friday. :-)
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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