On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:56, Hisham <hmun...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> That's not accurate. The dates are as follows: It was concluded in all but
> 1 class of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the
> assignements were concluded.) It continues in 1 class at this college and at
> 1 class at the SNDT Women's University. We asked College of Engineering Pune
> to stop the program in their classrooms last week. It is still being
> continued at this college by 1 professor nevertheless.
>
> Probably the same could have been highlighted enough at Signpost. The
> signpost heading conveys its closed down.
We had requested Signpost to amend it's heading.
>
> At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management.
>
> Well I cant help point CoEP where the director was much excited about the
> program and without his push directly / indirectly, I wonder if 800+ students
> would have voluntarily signed up. I will never agree if anyone says 800+
> students voluntarily asked/agreed for Wikipedia assignments without staff /
> whoever else asking them to do so.
True. However, even at CoEP, faculty were at liberty not to join the program
(and indeed, most of them chose not to.) However, the point made on the
learnings ought to be taken in conjunction with that of faculty involvement.
Director buy-in is important but can only compliment and not substitute for
faculty involvement and capability. In the classes where we have got better
results than in others, this played a critical role.
>
> I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters
>
> Well it was my suggestion/opinion if you are planning next roll out in Jan.
> Odd semesters in Indian colleges are longer ones July- Dec typically and give
> time for students / staff to do extra things. Even semesters are shorter
> Jan-May (April in many cases) so the duration for anything in colleges are
> limited in even sem. This is the reason why you will find most
> extra-curriculars happening in odd-sem. I am not sure if we did a time audit
> of the pilot, but it took very late to have students start editing and they
> were stopped almost in 2-3 weeks. We may not have that much time to engage
> with students / faculty on even semesters.
Ah, understood. That's an interesting and great point.
>
>> It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia.
> Fully agree. Having said that, given the relatively small community size in
> India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that Campus Ambassadors need
> to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies. We must
> however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward.
>
> I would say make CAs as wikipedians with atleast 500+ edits on en.wiki to
> give them a flavor of complexities in enwiki before they help out others. In
> other words, start early on CA's get more commitment early on, that before
> they go ahead and preach("teach") they practice("edit") enough.
I don't think anyone would suggest that CAs shouldn't edit more or understand
Wikipedia policies better. Having said that, the experience in the US
suggested that newbie CAs were as good as (and sometimes even better) than
existing Wikipedians in the role of CAs. (They hypothesis on this is that they
were helping teach Wikipedia to newbies - so they were able to calibrate and
structure their messaging accordingly.) As I said a sentence earlier, we do
need to modify our selection, training and ongoing development regime for CAs -
but edit count alone might not be the only measure (though an important one.)
hisham
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