Wikipedia talk:India Education Program/Archive 1

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Video Wikipedia talk:India Education Program/Archive 1

Help

I would like to help you please contact if you need any help --naveenpf (talk) 02:34, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Its great to have support from active and experienced Wikipedians like you. I am seeing Welcome Messages for newly joined students, thank you so much for welcoming "India Education Program" students. And special thanks for offering help. We will be in touch with you for help. Keep Supporting, Keep Inspiring AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 04:33, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Wow! This is excellent. I have not been very regular to WP lately. But found this project superb. This is definitely going to be a success, and helping WP improve in the way. My good wishes to everybody involved, and thanks for the dedication. Regards.--71.235.204.168 (talk) 14:11, 9 August 2011 (UTC) .. oops forgot to sign in the previous message. Signing now, --Dwaipayan (talk) 14:14, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Maps Wikipedia talk:India Education Program/Archive 1

User & Talk pages

Could the editors responsible for this program please ensure that all students are aware that when they are creating talk pages and user pages, they should match the chosen username exactly, if it is different then it will mean the pages are not attached to the account and will be deleted. I have come across this several times recently, for example User:Prerna chowhan created twice by User:Prerna Chowhan, just one capital letter is enough to make a difference. Also a number of the pages listed on Wikipedia:Database reports/Ownerless pages in the user space were created by people in this program as well. Thank you--Jac16888 ^Talk 12:20, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey thanks for bringing this to our attention, we ll surely keep this in mind. Thanks. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 11:26, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Copyvio in a New Articles

I patrol new articles and have run recently stumbled on Hyundai CSR. It appears that this article was written for a course attributed to this program. I have just nominated the page for a G12 deletion as the text is obvious a copyright violation. While this is a normal occurrence on WP, I thought you might want to know that a student is using the work of someone else as their own. At my university, this would almost certainly result in expulsion. OlYeller^Talktome 17:32, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

src: bhclondon.org.uk

Queries from the Wikipedia community

(NOTE: I have moved this whole section from Wikipedia talk:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics because I think it is of more general applicability. JohnCD (talk) 19:45, 5 October 2011 (UTC))

I'm sure I'm not the only one concerned over these questions.

• What's the timescale for these articles being "completed" and brought to a reasonable quality standard?

• Are they expected to meet basic WP standards in the meantime?

• Why are these rough drafts even on Wikipedia in the first place? Surely Pune could run their own MediaWiki server to allow space for the first drafts to be put together, without them being part of the publically visible encyclopedia.

So far I've seen a number of articles that are of very poor quality, both technically and in terms of WP standards. Basic formatting is broken (lack of editor training beforehand), the Manual of Style is completely ignored. Referencing and copyright policies in particular are being ignored. If these articles were from general editors, most of them would already have been slated for deletion.

I'm all in favour of university outreach projects, however they should not compromise the quality of the encyclopedia in this way. Drafts should be developed off-line, not left in WP article mainspace in this poor state. Nor should we compromise our copyright behaviour, referencing and basic content quality, just to provide an education sandbox.

What sort of pre-organisation took place through the outreach ambassadors? Were student editors briefed or trained on basic editing before being let loose? Andy Dingley (talk) 12:08, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

I second all the above. I've had a look at some of the changes and so far they've all needed to be reverted - mainly because it looks like blocks of text have been copied in from somewhere without wiki formatting or considering whether the info would improve the article. DexDor (talk) 21:26, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

I completely agree. We try to be welcoming, but these students do not seem to have had anything like an adequate briefing. It is a waste of time for us to delete all these copyright violations and empty articles and explain the problems again and again, but it must also be very dispiriting for the students. A minimum briefing should cover:

• You must not copy material into Wikipedia: read WP:Copy-paste, and ask the instructor if you do not understand it.
• How to set up a sandbox.
• Look at WP:CHEAT to learn about wiki markup, and Help:Wiki markup for more detail
• Experiment with markup in your sandbox. Try indenting text with leading spaces to see that it doesn't work, and to learn that if you see that peculiar effect, it means you have a leading space somewhere. Practice indenting using colon.
• You must not copy material into Wikipedia!
• How to leave a talk page message, properly headed and signed.
• Read WP:Your first article and ask if there is anything you don't understand.
• What is not encyclopedic, particularly WP:NOTHOWTO.
• You must not copy material into Wikipedia!!
• How to make a draft article using Help:Userspace draft or a sandbox
• If you get warning messages on your talk page, don't just ignore them and do the same thing again. If you don't understand a message, ask the person who signed it.
• You must not copy material into Wikipedia!!!

Such a briefing need not take long, and the time spent would be saved many times over. The copyright message in particular is extremely important and not hard to understand, but some students have gone on posting copyvios until they are blocked.

It should also be explained to the students that while we would like to help them, that does not mean that we will abandon the encyclopedia's standards. "Please don't delete this, I have to put it in for my course" will not cut any ice. I have the impression that some of them felt they had a deadline to put in something, ready or not: one article posted with the title "Interaction between fiscal and monetary policies" consisted only of the single character ' and others had only section headings. With at least one of those, when I went to userfy it I found that there was already a copy in user space - it had been moved out, still with no more than headings, into the main encyclopedia.

JohnCD (talk) 20:27, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi,

I would like to thank each one of you for you comments and putting in time and effort in the IEP. I understand that copy vio is a big big issue (probably the biggest one that we had). And I'd like to share with you all some of the several action steps we have taken to overcome this problem and making sure that students understand that they cannot copy-paste on wikipedia.

• we conducted several in-class sessions just to talk about copy vio issues; over 15 such sessions have been conducted
• CAs asking the students to firstly write in sandbox and get it approved by their profs or CAs; before they move it to the article space
• talking one-on-one with students who have made copy vios
• going desk to desk and solving specific queries
• requesting the professors to talk to students about copy vio in class

In order to prevent any bad articles from existing in Wikipedia, the online and campus ambassadors are going through the articles written by students and deleting any copied content and explaining to the student why this has been done.

I'd be happy to share with you all certain userids like: User:Ds731992, User:Raj2026, User:Anu2033; who had earlier made copyvios but are now doing good work. These students now understand that one cannot blatantly copy material from somewhere and paste it in wikipedia.

While the students are getting hang of things, we're making sure that they understand the nitty gritties sooner rather than later. We realize that this is not an easy process for anyone, and I'd like to thank you for your constant support to the program and the students. If you have any queries or concerns please feel free to drop a note to any of the campus ambassadors or to me.

Thanks Nitika.t (talk) 07:28, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

I'll just add that although this programme is essential, it is causing a flood of new articles from India, and with it, a huge headache for our New Pager Patrollers. With CorenBot not functioning, and with many of the new articles from India being essays made up with elements from multiple blogs and websites, and partially duplicating existing Wikipedia articles, I believe it is essential that they either prepare their articles in user space first or go through the WP:AfC process. We don't like having to discourage them by bluntly rejecting their efforts. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 08:58, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

These aren't even essays, they're just dumps of individual sentences. This lack of structure is one of the biggest quality problems evident. Wiki-editing always has a problem with this, and ongoing editing tends to make things worse, not better. It's really important (whoever is writing) that an article begins with a structured plan and some idea of an editorial goal, then adds content to fill this out. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:50, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

More specifically, which I didn't fully explain earlier, is that these individual sentences are WP:COPYVIO picked from multiple sources. It makes implementation of the detector impractical. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 12:46, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

The copyvio issues are the most serious problem, but even if this is ignored many of these edits don't improve WP and some are a real mess. Typical problems are lack of references, text pasted into the wrong place in articles (or even into the wrong article), text not blended with existing text, unclear English, poor wiki-formatting etc. There is also a consistent disregard for wiki etiquette (edit summaries, using preview rather than making dozens of minor changes, ignoring guidance from the existing WP community ...). DexDor (talk) 22:28, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure we can forgive the minor violations of wikiquette. But so far I've also seen people replacing existing pages with a totally different article on a different topic, posting all their homework in a single article (Wcsncpy , wcscpy , memcpy , labs) and trying several more times once it gets deleted, dumping huge amounts of source code and tables with output generated by those programs into articles, and that's just from the three out of dozens of assignments I reviewed so far. --Ruud 00:49, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I've seen this many times too. I have spent many hours on NPP this week trying to get some stats on these problems. As fast as I can delete and salt these pages, the authors just recreate them again under a slightly different page name. They do not check to see if articles on the subject already exist, and even after being told, they refuse to understand that the way to make an article is not by piecing together plagiarised sentences from dozens of different sources, and that Wikipedia is not the place to do a homework assignment.

Something has gone seriously wrong with this initiative and the people who organised this very noble project, need to do a major rethink, because India is such a vast continent with billions of English speakers, the disruption to Wikipedia is already approaching unmanageable proportions, and it's going to get worse. We don't have the NPP and/or admin capacity to cope with it. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:07, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

What I really don't get is why no one informed WikiProject Computing and WikiProject Computer science (and other WikiProjects related to the courses) before or at the start of the project. There would probably have been a few more capable people that would have volunteered as ambassadors and mentors. We could also have prepared for the fact that a lot of material that needing extensive review would be posted soon, instead of being informed of it through weird changes on our watchlists and AfD discussions. We could also have told beforehand that at least half of the topics selected are not appropriate for Wikipedia (I'm currently moving a lot of them to a Wikibook, before or after they get deleted.) The creators of this project probably expected a load of featured articles coming out of this initiative, but I've been a teaching assistant for long enough to know that you can't really expect that from a class of undergraduates. --Ruud 10:57, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+One of the problems is that many of the ambassadors themselves have had pages deleted, especially for copyvio. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 12:14, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Folks, we are working real hard on ground to get this message clear with the students that copy-paste is not going to be tolerated by community, few of them now know the power of our awesome community when they got warnings and page deletions. We are also encouraging students to create/test their articles first in their respective sandbox and then post it to main article. Leaving these glitches aside we have seen some amazing editors coming up with really great contributions, and that's what we hope from other students as well. Ram (talk o contribs) 14:10, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Re Rudd. Have we told the people at wikibooks about the incoming articles. They might want to check for copyvio etc. --Salix (talk): 15:43, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I requested Import rights there for this task and I immediately check the article and incorporate it into a Wikibook (b:C Programming so far, b:Data Structures is another candidate). I don't just want to dump the stuff in the Transwiki namespace, then we'd be better off just deleting the stuff.

On on hand it would have been better if they would have immediately started working on those Wikibooks, but on the other there is probably much less oversight on Wikibooks to handle the copyvios and other problems. --Ruud 16:12, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Ram, I hope it works, because our New Page Patrol System is already stretched - most of our patrollers do good work but we don't have enough patrollers and they are challenged when it comes to sorting out the multiple-sentence copyvios and the articles that duplicate an existing topic; it can take 10 - 15 minutes to patrol one page, and we don't have that kind of capacity. Remember that oour automatic copyvio bot is broken - we get up to 1,500 new articles a day arriving at en.Wiki and there are rarely more than 7 patrollers on duty. I've spent all day today sorting out these articles from India. I'm sure you have some great editors, but it appears that many of the ambassadors don't know the rules themselves, because their pages are being deleted too. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 16:13, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Kudpong, Ruud, others... I want you to know that we're taking this very seriously. Nitika and Hisham and some of their team are in SF this week and we'll be meeting about this tomorrow. I spent several hours today working on this. I'm also going to take some time tonight to do New Page Patrol myself so I can attempt to get some feel for the scale of the problem on a day to day basis. While I'm online, I'll be hopping in and out of IRC, and if you'd like to talk to me, please do. My IRC username is Philippe, and I'll usually idle in #wikimedia or #wikipedia-en-admins, but feel free to send me a private message. If you'd like to talk to me about this by IM, that's fine, too. My email address is philippewikimedia.org - send me an email with your IM client of choice, and I'll gladly send you my username on that client. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 05:11, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

My name is Hisham and I'm the person running India Programs, of which this initiative is a part. My team and I are taking this matter with the highest seriousness. Here's a summary of the things we've done

* Selected and trained a team of ~20 Campus Ambassadors (from 700 applicants.) This training was conducted over a full 2 days.

* Conducted more than 100 in-class training sessions for the faculty and students in the program. These include introductions to Wikipedia, basic primers on editing, refresher sessions on specific aspects of editing, multiple sessions on avoiding copy-pasting.

* Selected and trained ~20 more Campus Ambassadors to take the number up to ~40 Campus Ambassadors

* Realising the need for additional support, we selected & trained ~20 Online Ambassadors

* We have had multiple faculty meetings at the participating colleges to outline & plan the initiative, report progress, highlight issues & undertake corrective measures (especially on the aspect of copy-pasting.)

* Allocated individual Campus and Online Ambassadors to specific students so that co-ordination is improved.

* Specifically asked Campus and Online Ambassadors to work closely with students and provide early feedback on articles

* We have been encouraging students to edit in their sandboxes until a time when they are sure that the quality is acceptable - before moving it to article mainspace.

* Work closely with students to help them with how to edit articles, including telling them about how to ensure a neutral point of view, referencing and not copy-pasting.

The reason I am mentioning these is to give a flavour of the kind of effort that's been put in to ensure quality. We did not expect the level of some of the issues that we have experienced and we are working towards how best to mitigate this. We are working through this and trying to figure out the best way to control and avoid some of the issues. In the meantime, I'd like to thank all of you for your support. Hisham (talk) 10:00, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Can I ask, were CAs specific to particular courses? My reason for asking is that the Economics articles seem to have gone rather better than the Engineering articles. Was there some identifiable reason for this that we can learn from? Is it the nature of the topic, the course teaching beforehand, or was the wiki-supervision handled differently?

Another question, somewhat unrelated, is about the choice of titles. Digital storage oscilloscope? and Symbols and conventions used in welding documentation were clear empty gaps in the existing wiki where a notable topic has long needed an article writing on it - a great opportunity for a student. However welding and propeller (aircraft) already existed as largely complete articles. There's very little that any editor, even if highly subject-knowledgeable and wiki-experienced, would be able to add to these. Machine design in game engines? just doesn't seem to have any clear definition of scope attached to it at all. Who thought of these topics? Did students suggest them, or did they pick / were allocated from a list? Could the question of wiki-suitability (i.e. avoiding already-complete articles) have been looked at in more detail. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:47, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, CAs are assigned to specific classes. We are and will continue to learn from the experiences across various classes and colleges in this pilot. I currently don't think there is any difference between the engineering and economics colleges in terms of wiki-supervision. However, there is probably a learning in terms of selection of courses and topics. I know I'm grossly generalising, but in an engineering college, a first year student tends to be taught very elementary basic things. ...the kind of things which would already be covered in a decent wikipedia article or wouldn't pass muster for a decent wikipedia article. We will need to study this at the end of the pilot and learn from that. On your second point on selection of articles, the articles are selected by students and approved by their teachers. Students are shown the respective WP pages for their subject areas and they can look through the lists of start or stub articles. Students are strongly encouraged not to take complex articles where there it is not easy to add - but clearly in this case, they still went ahead and did these. Another learning that we will take on board going forward. Thanks for raising this, though. We'll compiling a detailed list of learnings and will be shortly be sharing these. Hisham (talk) 12:00, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Reporting mechanism

Please institute a reporting mechanism that will streamline the process of correcting student errors. I'd recommend:

• Each student place templates on their user and talk pages explaining their participation in this program and providing links (and perhaps a tag that can be copied) for reporting problems created by their edits.
• Create one or more pages here for reporting those problems.

Thanks. Jojalozzo 04:32, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

The template {{IEP assignment}} can be used on article talk pages. I would suggest that this be made a manditory requirement for all articles, all students be informed about using this template in their next class and that the template makes it clear that the article should deserve no special treatment. --Salix (talk): 15:06, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

{{WAP student}} can be used on student pages.--Salix (talk): 16:00, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Since many of the students participating in the IEP did not clearly identify as such, I wonder if it would be okay to add {{User WikiProject India Education Program}} to their user pages to make it easier to identify, check and possibly correct their edits until the mess has been cleaned up. What do you think? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:08, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

What happens for articles like Chip formation, Spark-ignition engine etc. where we already had an article in place beforehand? Although these are connected to the IEP project and probably warrant the talk page banner, we should remember that not all such articles were new creations for it, or should be treated as such in case of deletion. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:11, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Using talk pages

Were the students told about talk pages or how to use them? I noticed during the training and on the IEP materials here that students are told to communicate through email or IRC, but the Wikipedian community is attempting to communicate with them through their talk pages. None of the students I've communicated with have responded at all and I've left welcome messages for every student in the class I've been assigned to. For an example of this failure to communicate, see here. In the future, perhaps training on using talk pages should be emphasized (in addition to not plagiarizing!) --Danger (talk) 06:29, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the students have been trained to use talk pages, very few students mail us their query and I guess none turns up on IRC, if you check the talk pages of all the CAs you ll come to know about it, they are asking questions over there. Thanks. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 12:19, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

So stuff like this wouldn't happen then? Andy Dingley (talk) 13:14, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

src: pbs.twimg.com

Posible image copyvios?

Variator (variable valve timing)

I find it slightly difficult to believe any of these four as student's own work, although I can't source their originals. The drawings are high quality, poor reproduction, and include unrelated details and labels - all usually indicative of book scans. The photo could easily be taken by a student, except that the subject is a rare high performance car, and someone let the photographer hacksaw a chunk off the cam cover to show the innards! Andy Dingley (talk) 13:13, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

One of these has been raised at Commons:Deletion requests/File:Variable valve timing.jpg Andy Dingley (talk) 15:59, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

There are 2 more there now at Commons:Deletion requests/File:Variable valve timing in V5 and V6 engines.jpg and Commons:Deletion requests/File:Variable valve timing in I.C engines.jpg - Voceditenore (talk) 17:00, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Blatant copyvio. Article composed of sentences pasted from multiple sources including http://www.volkspage.net/technik/ssp/ssp/SSP_246.pdf --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 23:24, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately this article has now been deleted. It's not, or at least not entirely, a copyvio - the original article had been there and stable for a year or two, before these recent additions. I wonder how many more articles we're going to lose in this manner? Andy Dingley (talk) 23:45, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Restored to it's previous stable version. Danger (talk) 11:53, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Boiler design

See Commons:Deletion requests/File:BOILER.jpg Voceditenore (talk) 17:00, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Electric steam boiler

two more. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:16, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

There are too many of these peges to list here - I must have tagged/deleted a dozen of more in the last 3 days. If it's important I could probably grab them from my personal CSD and deletions logs. In the meantime the IP of the engineering college is now blocked (one user's account) due to repeated copyvios by the students and their ambassadors. I had thought of making a Schoolblock (WP:softblock), but under the circumstances, I don't think this would possible because of course, I don't know the IP number. I'll give it a day or two over the weekend, then perhaps I'll uncheck the IP block from the blocked user. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 23:34, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Please list the articles here. If they are at all like Electric steam boiler, the articles themselves also contain numerous substantial copyright violations. Roughly 90% of that article has been removed as direct copy-pastes. - SummerPhD (talk) 03:18, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

There are too many of these peges to list here - I think it's far more important for the organisers and ambassadors to realise the extent of this problem and do something about it before more are created by other users on the programme. A great many of the 40 ambassadors are also producing copyvio pages, so where does one start? I have started by blocking some users who have persistently recreated copyvio pages - even after being unblocked on request of the course leader. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 03:50, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree, once the problem has been highlighted, it just clutters up this page. To that end see the more general section I've started below. Voceditenore (talk) 09:31, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

src: beyondforeignness.org

Suggestions for the IEP program ambassadors, course leaders, and outside editors

Many of us trying to monitor and clean up these articles are from outside the IEP, including me. It would help enormously if:

All editors

• When you have remove copyvio from an article add Template:Cclean to the talk page as this makes explicit that it was removed, what the sources were, and clearly warns that it must not be re-added. It also helps keep track of the extent of the copyvio coming from this program.
• Add Template:IEP assignment to the talk page if it isn't already there, even if you aren't sure of the exact course/quarter it comes from. It will at least end up in Category:India Education Program student projects

IEP ambassadors and course leaders

• Please ensure that the students understand the rules concerning the uploading of images. They clearly do not. Images are also subject to strict copyright rules. Using a photo-editing program to scan, capture, alter or format a copyright image, makes a derivative work, and the copyight still belongs to the creator of the original image. Students cannot list themselves as the author or state "own work" and cannot upload such images to Wikimedia Commons. Even if they do give the true source/author of the image, if they do not have written permission from the copyright owner filed with the Wikimedia Foundation, they cannot upload the image.
• Please ensure that the students understand that they cannot post copyright material anywhere on Wikipedia, including user pages and sandboxes. They clearly do not. Such material needs to be strictly kept and worked on offline. I have just removed this from a student's sandbox and left them a note explaining why. I suspect there are many more cases of this. A related problem is outlined at User talk:Ankurjay007/Machine design in game engines (formerly Talk:Machine design in Game Engines) where the student published the article knowing it had copyright text pasted in and then gradually tried to edit it out. Apart from the fact that this results in copyright infringement available in the previous versions, it is the worst way possible to write an article, even offline. It almost invariably results in close paraphrasing which also constitutes a copyright infringement.

- Voceditenore (talk) 09:31, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

In addition to the concerns voiced above, I would like to call to IEP's attention to the fact that some of its students seem to be confused about the purpose of user signatures. User signatures are for talk pages and user pages and should never be added to actual articles. For example, a series of User:Rashminarayan's edits to International finance (such as this example) included user signatures, and that's not to mention the lack of sources supporting the content additions themselves. I reverted the article to a previous revision and left a polite caution notice on the user's talk page, but it seems the user has not been responsive to other users who have posted there. John Shandy` o talk 03:45, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Just for Pune University program?

The Welcome tab says the program is for Pune University. What about the other participating schools? Jojalozzo 21:36, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

The individual courses are in 3 separate institutions in Pune: College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), SNDT Women's University, and Symbiosis School of Economics (SSE). They can be found under the "Courses" tab. Each course has its own page accessible from there under the "Wikipedia Project Course Page" column. If you're looking for colleges outside Pune which may be using Wikipedia as an assignment, check Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy/Courses, Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses, Wikipedia:Canada Education Program/Courses, and Category:Wikipedia Ambassador Program courses. Some past (and possibly current) ones can be found at Wikipedia:School and university projects instead.

Some individual college ccourses go it alone without any kind of official "facilitation" (i.e. Ambassadors) or a dedicated WikiProject. They can be harder to find. I've been informally helping out students on an annual course at Longy School of Music for several years. I found it quite by accident. It's been very rewarding, and they do quite well on the whole. There three key reasons for their success in my view:

• Their professor edited on WP for a reasonable time before he started the course and knew the pitfalls, requirements, and rewards facing his students
• The course is small so it doesn't inundate WP with scores of projects all coming in at once and the students all know each other and their professor well
• The students have a realistic timescale in which to get to know the ropes and to eventually complete their assignments.

Voceditenore (talk) 05:59, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Perfectly logical suggestions Voce. It is clear that because Wikipedia is a permanent work in progress, we have no deadlines for new artikcles, and hence editors, whether they are participating in an educational programme or not, should not be expected to meet deadlines - editing Wikipedia should not be set as coursework for university credits. The course organisers have been requested to provide lists of all the students in Pune so that our patrollers can look out for their articles and provide help where necessary. The organisers have also been requested to better inform the students of the strict requirements for copyright control as practiced under US law where the company is registered and the servers are located, and to ensure that new articles are prepared in user space first. The situation is being discussed (through the night) at top level by the WMF, and the outcome will be made available as soon as possible. Due to time zones, this may take a day or two.. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 11:07, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Although WP doesn't have deadlines, I don't see the imposition of a deadline on coursework as being in conflict with WP practice. In particular, coursework could be done in userspace, or college project space, drafts and then submitted for a quick assessment before release into mainspace, with a further assessment at the course deadline on the work so far. The emphasis on each assessment could vary according to the course goals: whether this is an exercise in individual (or college team) editing within the Wiki framework (primarily as a subject-knowledge exercise) or does it also need to teach editing in a public collaborative environment, such as WP mainspace (becoming significantly an educational exercise on the techniques and community, not just the subject). This would address the following points:

• The need to QC drafts before release, issues passim.
• The ability to work on drafts without public interference. At digital storage oscilloscope we have now gone from what was a blank canvas to now a stub. This reduces the opportunity for the student's experience.
• The ability to work in "the WP context", with access to Commons, templates and easy outbound links. This is easier than trying to achieve the same on a local MediaWiki within a college.
• Some experience (in the second phase) of public collaborative editing.

Note that this would require "blank canvas" topics, which are obviously somewhat harder to find than topics in general. I don't see this as insurmountable though - knowledge isn't yet exhausted by WP coverage. It would also have the advantage of a level playing field for the student who gets Symbols and conventions used in welding documentation? rather than Welding (already at FA, so hard to take forwards). Andy Dingley (talk) 11:39, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be more precise to name this the Pune University Education Program? Jojalozzo 01:25, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

src: interferencearchive.org

Best practice guide?

Does WP yet (for it surely ought to!) have a guide to best practice in running college projects like this? Andy Dingley (talk) 11:18, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

From what I see, but assuming good faith, probably not. In any case it does not compare with my own long experience of organising college courses, and teacher training, in India and across Asia. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 12:31, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like we would benefit from having such knowledge written down (in your copious free time!), so that other projects can learn from it. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:50, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Featured article Welding now receiving content dumps.

Now seeing unstructured content dumps. Editors reverted and warned, please discuss here before we go any further. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:31, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Let's avoid forking discussions and direct any comments (if any) to here. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 17:43, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

src: www.thebetterindia.com

Good articles

On a positive note, there also seem to be coming some good articles from this project. Well, actually, I found the first good one during my reviewing: Double-ended priority queue. A quick scan of the sources didn't reveal any copying-and-pasting either (although a second pair of eyes wouldn't hurt ;). --Ruud 19:29, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the software articles have often been quite good, even those when they've perhaps been more appropriate for Wikibooks than Wikipedia. The Economics articles are said to be too, although that's outside my field to be able to judge them quickly. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:38, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for looking into it, I would suggest do have a look at this also Stack_(abstract_data_type)#Applications. Thanks. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 19:41, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Robinson Crusoe Economy is a GA. DexDor (talk) 19:43, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

src: i64.tinypic.com

AI articles

I've gone through a few of the articles listed at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Artificial Intelligence. Those that have been edited by students I've reverted for the usual reasons. I haven't bothered putting notes on user talk pages as it appears to be a waste of time/bits. Despite the number of links to these articles there don't seem to be many watchers. DexDor (talk) 19:58, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Also, I notice that one of the students is planning to edit the Turing test article. That's a very bad idea -- it is a well-developed article that gets a lot of attention, and any edits that are not well-planned will immediately draw hostile responses. The student is sure to find this an unpleasant experience. Looie496 (talk) 22:22, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, also see what happened at Welding two threads up. --Ruud 22:25, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Observations about the role of Campus Ambassadors and instructors

I've been looking at the ratio of Campus Ambassadors (CAs) to students, the preparation of the CAs, and the involvement of instructors and I think there are some lessons that can be learned for the future.

1. Don't underestimate how much experience is needed on Wikipedia. It takes months of regular editing and content creation to become experienced enough to really mentor other editors properly. Two days of training for students who are new themselves to Wikipedia simply isn't enough. I picked 15 CAs for this program at random and looked at their prior Wikipedia experience before they were made Ambassadors:

7 had no experience whatsoever of editing articles

3 had only done very minor edits to articles (ranging from 1 article to 10)

5 had either created articles or added a substantial paragraph/section to one, but 4 out of these 5 had produced copyright violations. (I discovered and repaired 3 of them in the course of doing this mini-survey alone.)

Once they were chosen as CAs, did anyone look over their previous edits and give them feedback before expecting them to to start approving article topics and mentoring other students? Maybe this happens offline (which it shouldn't), but I doubt it since the copyvio was fairly long-standing (from the summer) and none of the CAs went back to repair their mistakes.

2. The ratio of CAs to students is way too high in some courses. Especially given the undue reliance on them. For example, Data Structures and Algorithms has only 3 CAs to mentor 70+ students.

3. The over-reliance on CAs to make this work is unfair to them. They have basically been in the firing line here, and expected to deal with all sorts of complaints and problems coming from the rest of Wikipedia. That shouldn't be their job. Remember too, that apart from their own inexperience, many (if not most) of them are dealing with their fellow students. It's very hard to tell your classmate that their topic is misguided, their work is sub-standard, and worst of all that they have been plagiarizing. I don't imagine they've even had training in spotting it, but even if they did, you can see how reluctant they would be to look for it and then have to warn a fellow student.

4. Absent instructors. This may be a bit controversial, but I don't think any instructor should be actively encouraged to use Wikipedia as a class assignment unless they are willing to roll up their sleeves, gain adequate editing experience first, and then work side-by-side with their students for the duration of the assignment. They shouldn't be relying on the CAs to do their work for them, and frankly they shouldn't be setting an assignment when they haven't the most minimal understanding of what it really involves. They should be here (and on the talk pages of the editors, admins, and WikiProjects who are having to deal with their assignments) answering questions and responding to the issues raised.

Voceditenore (talk) 20:20, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that instructors who aren't prepared to participate actively should be prohibited from using Wikipedia as a class assignment, but the issues that will arise if they don't should be made much clearer. From what I've seen at the the Foundation's Outreach pages so far, the general tone is that it's fine to just set the assignment and never interact with Wikipedia on wiki themselves, in some cases letting the over-stretched (and sometimes ill-prepared) CAs do all the heavy lifting. In fact it's presented as an advantage for the instructor. This is misguided. The really successful projects of this type have had hands-on instructors, or at least ones who are willing to communicate openly on Wikipedia, and take responsibility for issues arising from the work they've set. The disastrous ones, e.g. this one from a US university a few years back, have not. Voceditenore (talk) 09:40, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm very disappointed in all this, it completely waters down the significance of being an Ambassador. When I was asked (as one of the earliest Wikipedia ambassadors), I submitted the required information and rationale, and I thought that the closed decision to make me an ambassador was based on my relatively comprehensive experience on Wikipedia, and the maturity with which (I hope) I go about my work as an editor and administrator. I'm not sure now that I have much pride in displaying the ambassador logo on my user page. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 04:05, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

IRC office hours with India Education Program team

Hi all, please join us at an IRC office hour to discuss these issues on Wednesday at 15:00 UTC at #wikimedia-office. See meta:IRC office hours for details on how to connect, time conversion, etc. Hope to talk with you then. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 01:13, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

More copyright violations

Copyright violations remain a major issue with the articles. See [1], [2] (both User:Netra_Nahar). --138.246.2.177 (talk) 08:02, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. However, your AfD nominations were incomplete: process unauthorised for IP and new users. In such cases, don't hesitate to bring such articles to the notice of an admin or an established user - or alternatively, consider registering for an account :) --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 08:21, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I've cleaned the copyvio and false attribution of quotes from Artificial Intelligence in Data Mining. The article is now a stub with no material in it that is not already in Data mining. It took me one hour to do this as the article was copypasted from 7 separate sources. The continuing copyvio from this project has become an absolute timesink for editors and is rapidly making the IEP a net detriment to Wikipedia. It's got to stop. I also left a note on the student's talk page as they have also pasted copyright material into a user space draft for another article. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Voceditenore (talk o contribs) 18:55, 14 October 2011?

Well thanks for pointing this out again, I personally went down to her college last weekend and tried to find her, but couldn't contact her, I ll now directly report the Professor responsible for her and even try my best to contact her as soon as possible. Thanks. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 12:08, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate that. One of the problems is that I suspect a lot of these students are getting mixed messages from their CAs. In this case another CA wrote on the student's talk page yesterday "Your article is looking gud...Great going...Keep editing". I know that the CAs on the course are all overstretched. But if they haven't got the time or experience to evaluate articles and check them carefully for copyvio (which is entirely understandable), then they need make sure that they don't give the students an evaluation that will give them false confidence. It's better to say nothing or "I don't know" or "I need a second opinion". This is really important. That poor student must be thoroughly confused by now. Voceditenore (talk) 12:49, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. The "Add more content now!" message at Talk:Electric steam boiler was unhelpful, especially right after a large article had had to be stripped right back, owing to the copyvio issue. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:11, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Template

If anybody besides me finds it useful, I'm working on a template to exhaustively explain these issues to students at User:Moonriddengirl/Uw-copyright-new. I'm afraid that I haven't got all the parameters working, but it'll serve for me in a pinch. Feel free to improve it or (if you'd rather not) make suggestions at its talk page. :) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 13:43, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Multiple copyright violations

I have reverted all of the additions to:

• Socially responsible investing
• Terrorism insurance
• National Housing Bank
• Insurance
• Capital adequacy ratio
• Non-financial asset
• Hundi
• Zero interest rate policy

as blatant copyright violations. Seriously, we need to review all of the articles involved in this program. - SummerPhD (talk) 15:51, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Converted to bulleted list for clarity.--Kudpung ??????? (talk) 16:32, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

From the experience we've had with engineering articles - you might find the stuff gets put back in with a bit of paraphrasing and lots of errors. The students just don't seem to get that they should understand what they are "writing" - one IT article (now deleted as hoax) was completely based on a parody essay off the internet. They have however found they can delete copyvio notices etc off talk pages. I was hoping someone in authority in Pune would have stopped the students by now, but thats obviously not happened. I was also hoping that someone from IEP would provide a list of all the articles. Several of the IEP pages (e.g. Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics) have been used by WPians to record the status of articles, but I'm aware of several affected articles that are not linked from these pages. These lists also need careful monitoring as the students have been removing comments they don't like (as well as making updates to their usernames etc). DexDor (talk) 16:53, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to see more comment from Pune, from teachers rather than just CAs. What's their attitude to this? What are students expected to be capable of achieving, or is this level of work actually seen as acceptable? I don't like to slate students' work like this, but when so much of this stuff is bad enough to be harmful to the encyclopedia, just how much patience do we have to stretch? If the teaching staff share our opinion that the bad stuff is indeed bad, then I'd be happier about wiping it. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:24, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I just went through all 40 Ambassadors' talk pages again, because it's exactly 7 days ago since I wrote to them all, and nothing seems to be taking much effect yet. If anything, the situation is getting worse due to all the edits that are now being made to existing articles. The Ambassadors won't complete any edit summaries, so I suppose it will be our job to check all their edits. Looks like some established articles are now getting some heavy treatment, but at least we now have some fairly comprehensive lists of students and their articles at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students . We could put their talk pages and their articles on our watchlists and do some minor clean up, or tag or block them as necessary. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 17:53, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

CCI request

There is an open CCI request regarding every single participant in this project, which I intend to accept. Is the current cleanup effort/listing sufficient to make a CCI unnecessary? MER-C 02:28, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

There's been a huge storm over this and the Indian IEP organisers were called to a meeting in the USA. The situation is receiving top priority attention at the WMF, so I don't think opening another discussion would be strictly necessary. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 05:56, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Frankly, I'm in favour of it. It's not another discussion as such. The CCI discussion is just to establish whether it is worth opening a systematic investigation of each article invovled. One advantage is that once accepted, all the articles from the project will be in a single accessible list which can be worked through systematically after the dust settles. At the moment the actual article lists are all over the place under various sub-courses of the project. Many of them are out of date or have the wrong title and/or the wrong student's name attached. The courses' deadline was the 12th but appears to have been extended for some (possibly all?) courses. There's going to be flood of these. It's a huge drain on individual editors' time and resources to try and do this all now on an ad hoc basis. We simply cannot keep up, especially since the plagiarism is often from multiple sources in each article. It take up to an hour to find and remove it from a single article. Also some of the students, particularly in the economics course, finished their stuff a lot earlier (August/September) and added to exisitng articles rather than creating new ones so they don't show up on NPP. Many of these articles may have slipped under the radar. Voceditenore (talk) 09:05, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

From that explanation, I would have to agree. You have extraordinary patience with clean ups from copyvios (and huge SPI as I know from other issues), but this is going to be a mammoth task. There are a couple of hundred students involved and not only their creations but other articles they have contributed to will need to be checked thoroughly. Where do we get the personpower? I am fairly sure that the campus ambassadors are not en mesure to be able to take this on, although ultimately it should be their responsibility. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 09:31, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

If a CCI is opened, it's not going to be conventional -- the contribution surveyor is not up to this task. Looks like this needs a dedicated hack (which I need to program) and some thought on how to rip the user list from Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students (find all links to the user namespace not containing "/", edit count < 500 I think). In the meantime, please make sure that Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students lists and links to the userpages of all the students and the ambassadors who need to be CCIed. Do I need to check for image copyvios as well?

Is there a place where I can follow the WMF situation? MER-C 10:26, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes - here! and here. Please read the entire contents of this page to obtain an overview of the situation. There have been other discussion about this - the previous one was on my talk page (now archived). We've done our best and we're now saturated. You need to make an appeal to the campus administrators for any help you need. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 11:07, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

There is no centralised WMF discussion but see also:

• User talk:Kudpung/Archive 01-15 Oct 2011#People manamgment
• User talk:Kudpung/Archive 01-15 Oct 2011##IEP and CAs.
• User talk:Kudpung/Archive 01-15 Oct 2011#IEP Student List
• User talk:Mdennis (WMF)#CorenBot
• User talk:Moonriddengirl - you know aboout this already. Mdennis & MRG are the same person.
• User talk:Hisham#India Education Programme - Hisham is the project consultant for the WMF.

You also need to check for images - some appear to have been scanned form books.

Kudpung ??????? (talk) 11:16, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the helpful info. I'll wait for a bit (up to 5.5 weeks, depending on RL) until the projects conclude so we can capture all of the late submissions. MER-C 13:48, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia talk:Ambassadors#Watchlist suggestion. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 07:31, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Another Copyvio

Tendulkar Committee copyvio of planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_pov.pdf. All this editor's contributions to other articles need to checked. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 09:00, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Offline checking

Does anyone have access to Higher Engineering Mathematics by Grewal? This edit should be checked for copyvio. Danger (talk) 19:28, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

At User talk:Kudpung#CopyVio and other: This is a message to Mihir, but I think it concerns everyone. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 01:36, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Copyright violations in Object Oriented Modeling and Design

In the course Object Oriented Modeling and Design I have been finding a considerable amount of copyright violations. I have marked a diagram on the talk page as such. If anyone has any questions from me or would like me to help review articles before publishing, I would be more than happy to help. OlYeller^Talktome 14:14, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Electrical Safety Test

Electrical Safety Test by User:Elec safe

Includes material from these sources. [3] [4] [5]

It might be connected with the IEP, and has all the obvious signs, but there is no certain way of knowing without checking the list of students. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 09:10, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

• From the profile on his user page and "What links here", he doesn't seem to be either a student or a part of the IEP. Voceditenore (talk) 06:46, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Shut it down

Every day there are copyright violations posted here; copyvio after copyvio after copyvio. This project in practice is doing far more harm than good to the encyclopedia, and unfortunately, unless those running it start getting tough with copyvios, it needs to be ceased before more problems emerge. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 16:04, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

It's almost over. It's going to take a lot of clean-up afterwards but hopefully the Foundation's Global Outreach people will take the lessons from this project on board. Voceditenore (talk) 16:29, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Almost over? We're probably going to see a flood of postings when half the students submit their homework right before the deadline. --Ruud 11:43, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree. :( But the drama it would take to shut down the IEP program in this late stage just isn't worth it, especially since it had the full backing of the WMF. The process would be yet more of a time-sink and would probably still be going on long after the courses ended. You could make your views known at Talk:Wikimedia Foundation - India Programs/Education Program. I tried to point out them that initiating a program on this scale with no warning, let alone liason, with English Wikipedia was a huge mistake. Don't know if it will make any difference though. Voceditenore (talk) 13:40, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Never mind the ambassadors, the professors, or the students - how much experience did the principals of the WMF have at contributing to articles and creating new ones before approving this program? Jeh (talk) 07:28, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

For several months the WMF has been developing some excellent new systems for new page patrolling and the reception of new editors. However, they have little to no first hand experience of what this involves, and prefer to base their developments on statistics rather than listen to the empirical findings of those experienced members of the community who do the cleaning up. This is one of the reasons why WP:ACTRIAL was rejected in spite of its clear consensus reached by a debate involving around 500 editors and admins. I only know of one WMF staff member who has significant experience with editing Wikipedia from the clean up end. However, the WMF is now listening to the community and this may all change positively in the near future, but there is still little transparency as to who is actually in charge of the education programmes. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 09:10, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I've attempted to find out who came up with this debacle (to ascertain the answer to Jeh's question), but everything pertinent at meta and outreach points right back here, where there is little info on who's in charge. I'm thoroughly annoyed. Danger (talk) 09:20, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

This is a great example of why dogmatic statements like our own shouldn't be viewed as suicide pacts. This is the second rather clear demonstration (ACTRIAL being the first, which also chewed up many, many hours of my and Kudpung's time) that something is seriously wrong with the approach we've been taking. I'm not saying the IEP can't go forward in some way, but it has got to be better controlled than this. I haven't gotten too overly involved in this (yet), but I've seen it rear its ugly head in spots; see Talk:Financial inclusion for what I ran into. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 18:47, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Even if NPP was perfect, it still wouldn't catch the additions to existing pages. Unless a college project takes a deliberate policy to only create new pages (at the cost of moving into more and more obscure topics), then we're inevitably going to see a shift towards reworking existing pages, as the syllabus-related topics are covered even more thoroughly. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Net negatives for the entire Wikipedia movement

There are two points - two net negatives for the entire Wikipedia project - that to me are so blatantly obvious but which seem to have been totally disregarded:

1. Putting highly inexperienced ambassadore and their students through a programme that is tied to a deadline and the stress it has produced, will not encourage such students to continue to participate to Wikipedia.
2. Expecting admins and inexperienced page patrollers under stress to do a clean up that is not of their making, will not endear them to do this kind of work in future.

Future Wikipedia outreach and education initiatives must be properly planned, and perhaps should wait until the new 'new user' and page patrolling systems are up and running. -Kudpung ??????? (talk) 03:27, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

To be fair we all got a 100% raise: to nothing. If paid staff are going to create these messes without consulting the unpaid janitors, perhaps they should be responsible for a little mopping! Danger (talk) 09:20, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Paid staff can't mop. This is part of the problem. :)

As I recently explained at my contractor talk page, it was made very clear to me when I took the contract that I could continue to do as I liked as a volunteer, but when I became involved in an issue as a contractor, I had to abide by this principle: the Wikimedia Foundation does not control content.

Now, as I understand it based on my own prior research into copyright law, this is important for all of us, because we currently rely on the WMF to serve as an online service provider. Suppose User:JaneBobDoe copies a picture from a press agency and puts it on Commons. Nobody notices this copyvio, and other users pick up this image and use it in a number of featured articles. The press agency finds out. Because WMF is an online service provider (and not a publisher), they must take action by the mechanisms described in OCILLA. If WMF was a publisher (that is, taking "an active role in selecting and editing the materials they publish" (Burgunder, Lee B. (29 January 2010). Legal Aspects of Managing Technology. Cengage Learning. p. 305. ISBN 978-1-4390-7981-2. )), they would be directly liable for copyright problems. If WMF begins paying employees to edit the site, or asking them to evaluate such matters, they cross the line into exercising editorial control instead of passively providing space and risk losing their immunity. If they lose their immunity, as I see it, one of two things happens: (a) we get sued out of existence, or (b) they stop allowing volunteers to edit freely and require all content to be evaluated by staff for copyright & libel concerns to avoid (a).

Please note that I'm wearing my volunteer hat in writing this. The principle exists; I've been told my parameters. But the reasons for it are my individual inference and they may not align perfectly with the WMF stance. I held these beliefs well prior to taking my contract and have said so at various copyright points more than once: we need WMF to maintain distance to protect the project overall.

That said, as I understand it, they are reaching out to find experienced and knowledgeable volunteers who are willing to do any necessary clean up. I imagine they may discuss their strategies at the office hours later today (or early tomorrow, depending on where you are :)). --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:58, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

That makes sense (the bit about paid WMF staff not cleaning up). But given that, why on earth did they launch this project without first thinking through the impact it would have on the volunteer editors here and communicating with them openly on wiki. Contact only started after the sheer number of complaints and concerns had pretty much made it impossible to ignore. Even then, it's been very limited and still largely confined to invitations to IRC, which is not transparent nor is it feasible for many editors. This project involved hundreds of minimally supervised and ill-prepared students editing in a very concentrated period. Surely they could have seen that dealing with the consequences would involve thousands of hours of our collective time? Unfortunately, what's happened has led more than one editor to think, rightly or wrongly, that many on the WMF staff (with you as a stellar exception) are so divorced from the day-to-day work on Wikipedia that the impact never occurred to them. Or, it did occur to them but they didn't care. Not a fab outcome :( Voceditenore (talk) 14:40, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Not having been there when the project was launched, I really can't speak to any of the thoughts or conversations that when into launching it, but I am willing to speculate that nobody anticipated the problems that have arisen. The Public Policy Initiative from which this stems seems to have gone pretty much okay, and I would assume they expected similar outcome. Considering how appalled people have been by the problems here, I really don't think that they didn't care about the impact. :/ I'm flying out to San Francisco this week. Part of my contract includes helping staff understand the culture of the projects and while I think that the message has gotten through that the community is pretty disappointed with how all this went, I'll make sure that this is conveyed. Somehow. And I really ought to sign this one User:Mdennis (WMF), but this back-and-forthness is getting a bit weird even for me. I'll wind up at WP:SPI. :D --Maggie/Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:32, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Let's not run away with the assumption that copivio is the only problem. There is the overall issue of standard and pertinence of articles that are not India-specific, but which will severely compromise the Wikipedia reputation for quality. I have mentioned the other collateral damage above. The division of roles between the WMF and the volunteer community is too foggy even for me to understand, and it's only since I have begun working closely with some of the major players over there in the office, that I'm beginning to see through some of it. It's very difficult to see who is actually in charge there. It seems to be a very flat hierarchy on the contemporary German model for collective collaboration, but I have already seen some classic examples of buck-passing. It's not done deliberately and I am aware that enormous good faith is put into the global WMF operation, but these recent discussions have proven that it's not easy to locate the right person(s) to talk to. Those who are paid to investigate new ways of expanding Wikipedia globally and present education initiatives have never done (much of) the work on the factory floor. That's why they are asking for stats, and screencasts of page patrolling work. There comes a time when the empirical reports from the factory workers need to be heard. These findings are often worth far more than data gathering and extrapolation. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 14:56, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi. I want to make sure that when I mention copyvios in my "why staff can't mop" statement that I'm not misleading anybody into thinking that I mean that staff can't mop copyvios. Liability for copyvios and libel is simply the outcome of staff becoming involved in editorial processes. I used a copyvio example because copyvio is where my head generally is. :) I could as easily have used an example related to a BLP. When staff crosses the line into exercising editorial judgment, the WMF risks becoming a publisher and no longer an online service provider. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:32, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Page patrol statistics

The graph looks encouraging, but I would guard against getting euphoric - the drop in only eight days off the near 30-day backlog only represents the enormous stops that have been pulled out by experienced members of the community due to the IEP problem. It nevertheless still leaves a 20-day backlog that represents thousands of pages - and this will creep back up.

The community will not take kindly to being expected to do this again. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 11:16, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, especially if CorenSearchBot is still down; that made things several orders of magnitude more time-consuming. And the regular NPPers (like Kudpung and I) don't particularly enjoy having giant floods of articles dumped on us either; would it kill someone to mention something to us when they're expecting a large number of articles from a group of inexperienced editors? Had I known what was going to happen, I would have pulled together a list of the accounts to watch for so I could pick them out. A little advance notice to the regular NPPers would greatly help matters; I know it's sometimes easy to forget we exist, but those of us who know what we're doing can actually be an asset to projects like this when we have a little foreknowledge. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 18:47, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

IRC Office Hour about India Education Program

The team from the India Education Program is compiling a bunch of information right now so there will be more information on-wiki about the program and the steps they've been taking in an attempt to combat the quality issues we've been having. Unfortunately, they are currently on a flight back to India right now, so it may take a day until they're able to get online again. Please know I and the rest of the Global Ed team are reading all the comments carefully, and I speak for all of us when I say we really appreciate the efforts everyone has been putting in. 

I wanted to alert watchers of this page that I've also scheduled another IRC Office Hour at #wikimedia-office with the India Education Program team for Friday at 2 a.m. UTC. A link to the time conversion is available on the Meta page linked above. I hope many of you will be able to join us during the chat to answer some of the outstanding questions about the India Education Program. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Context on India Education Program (IEP) from India Programs (21 October 2011)

Have put in a note on IEP which should provide some context to some of these discussions as well as address (many) aspects raised in this page. Hisham (talk) 00:56, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Electric steam boiler

Contributions were reverted as copyright violations and the editor was warned. New additions from the same editor were also copyright violations. This whole project is a mess. - SummerPhD (talk) 04:30, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

User has been blocked, and the article tagged for copyvio. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 05:22, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

This is yet another instance from India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics. See my comments in the section below. Voceditenore (talk) 09:43, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Have you pinged Hisham? He flew back to India two days ago, but I'm not sure if he's gone down to Pune yet. Shame I'm only 3 or 4 hours away. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 11:15, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Absent CAs at India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics

India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics is one of the courses with significant and ongoing copyright violation problems. New students are still adding their names, and worse, they are still adding copyright material. I just cleared out another sandbox that was full of it. I left notes for each of the four students involved, e.g. [6], and I gave a heads-up to each the two listed CAs for that course in case the students came to them with questions, e.g. [7]. I now discover that it was probably a complete waste of my time. One of the CAs hasn't edited anywhere on Wikipedia for 4 weeks [8] and the other not for 6 weeks [9]. The instructor (whose user name can only be found by looking at the page history for that course), is not interacting on Wikipedia at all apart from periodically adding bits to the course page [10]. Really, this is quite unacceptable. Voceditenore (talk) 09:39, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Somewhat drastic proposal

I'm just brainstorming at this point, so maybe someone should talk me out of this.... but it seems like basically every example of fluent English I have seen come out of this project is a copyright violation. I am inclined to suggest that every unsourced contribution by an IEP contributor be removed unless it is sourced, so that we can verify that it is not a copyright violation. In the past, our presumptive removal has been limited to individual editors, but at this point--after having reviewed hundreds of diffs from this project--I think it should be liberally applied here as well. Calliopejen1 (talk) 15:17, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, I see a couple of problems. The students often do reference the copyvio material (but sometimes not with the source they actually used), so it would still have to be checked. Fluent polished English, especially if in marked contrast to an editor's other work is often an indicator that it should be investigated further. But it seems a bit drastic at this point to do it presumptively without investigating. Having said that, I've found that a quick way to spot copyvio is to open the editing box of the version that shows the first big addition of material. This is an example. If you see text in narrow columns instead of extending all the way to the right-hand edge of the editing box, it almost invariably means that it was pasted in from a PDF. Also, a peculiar layout (which only shows up in the editing box) often indicates pasting from a website. Compare this from a WP article (scroll down to the end of the History section) and its source. Voceditenore (talk) 15:49, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I know how to spot copyvios, but I think it will be next to impossible to root out all the copyvios without aggressive presumptive removal. I've noticed that even badly-written English can be a closely paraphrased, mangled version of a copyrighted source. Yes, students could source something to an irrelevant source, but then it should be removed on the grounds that the source does not verify the text. I want to be able to see the source that gives the facts and then compare it to the language in the article. It is unlikely (though anything is possible!) that a student would copy the language from one source and then find an entirely different source to support the facts in the first source. IMO, this aggressive presumptive removal seems like the only way to ensure that likely copyvios do not remain in Wikipedia. One problem is that sometimes students' contributions are sourced to (and appear to be copied from) books published in India, which are often not available online. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:04, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I can't remember which ones, but I definitely encountered a couple of articles from this class which had been copied verbatim from one source available online or through google books but had referenced it to another source, also online, which said something similar but not verbatim. It might be worth asking at Wikipedia talk:Contributor copyright investigations whether the presumptive removal of anything in fluent English from this group is OK. It strikes me as bit premature. Voceditenore (talk) 16:43, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

I think dropping a line to MRG on her tp would get the quickest results. I know she's up to her neck at the moment, but she's being extraordianrily helpful. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 05:27, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

I did, but she's awfully busy at the moment, so she may not see it. In any case, I know that the recommendation at Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Indian Education Program is to wait until the students have completely stopped editing, which we won't know for sure until the various courses have well and truly finished and the grades are in. One reason is that even after cleaning a page, the students go right back and add the stuff again. So we end up duplicating our efforts. See for example, Talk:Regional Rural Bank. - Voceditenore (talk) 16:01, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+Hi. :) Yes, I'm in California at the moment, but the office is only just opening and I'm catching up with some volunteer stuff. :D I've been thinking about how we might be able to organize this (and I say we humbly, not knowing yet how much I will be allowed to help), and I'm wondering if we can use hidden categories? Perhaps we could develop three: one for articles in the project that have not yet been sorted, one for articles that have been checked/cleared/cleaned, and one for articles that raise concerns, including those that Calliopejen mentions. We could get a bot to put all of the IEP articles in the first category and as they are reviewed replace them with one or the other. When unsorted & "red flag" categories are empty, we could get the bot to clear out the remaining category?

My thought here is that this would help organize the cleanup and focus attention on particularly those articles that do raise red flags. I know that Hisham is recruiting some of the campus ambassadors from other areas to review the material (not sure where he is with that at the moment), and this might be the easiest way to help organize this.

Alternatively, we could follow the model of the Darius Dhlomo CCI and presumptively blank articles that raise red flags until they can be thoroughly reviewed. That method was not without pitfalls, though. :) We found that some people just reverted the blanking without doing any review at all, either because they didn't understand it or they simply didn't care. While presumptive blanking has the advantage of stopping spread of copyvios and keeping other contributors from wasting time expanding material they can't keep, hidden categories have the advantage of being less obvious, which makes it less likely that the category would be removed out of process.

These are just some of the ideas I've been kicking around. Any thoughts? --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 16:19, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks MRG. The categories might be a good solution. Either way is fine by me. Actually, given the extremely high correlation between fluent English and copyvio in these articles and the sheer mind-numbing work it's taking to deal with them, the more inclined I am to presumptive removal. Calliopejen is right. Perhaps we could have some kind of notice at Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Indian Education Program to the effect that we're doing presumptive removal? Then we could add the link on the talk page and/or the edit summary. It would save a lot of time writing out the "why" every time we do it. Voceditenore (talk) 18:09, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

I think for obvious reasons I can't really argue one way or another for how this should best be approached. :) But there is a template that is used for presumptive removal in CCIs: {{CCI}}. Certainly, notes can be added to the CCI subpage if that's the route taken. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 19:11, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how we stand policywise on presumptive removal; 'extrajudicial' blanking of the suspect sections, or even deletion of pages that have copivios from too many sources to list may have policy implications that I'm not familiar with. The idea of a hidden cat is excellent - I could quickly go through all the pages I have caught and add them to it. While I gave up in the end while patrolling and left many of the new IEP pages for other patrollers and CAs to pick up and process, I did keep a local record of them. FWIW, I deleted another blatant IEP copyvio recreation for the third time last night (simply because it was on my wl), I salted the page and if it's recreated again on a slightly different title I will block the user. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:41, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+Well, that's the main reason that I was initially against it. To clean the copyvio properly we really ought to find the source that was copied and make sure that it didn't have a compatible license. This isn't the same situation as the "normal" presumptive removal which applied to a single editor who has been demonstrated to have repeatedly copypasted articles, and usually on a large scale. This is a collection of individuals (albeit 900 of them!), and there is a significant risk that some innocent ones could be caught in the crossfire. I'm also happy to leave it in all in the articles until it can be proven to be a copyright violation and just flag them up with hidden categories. Once the CCI gets underway, it will take many weeks and literally hundreds of hours of editors' time. It will also leave the copyvio in place (and trust me, there's tons of it) until all the IEP articles can be checked. But that's the price that may have to be paid. I've given up trying to clean them now unless someone asks me to look at a specific article. As Kudpung and I pointed out above, until the courses are finished, it's quite likely to be put back. For those of you who've never done this kind of work, it really is mind-numbing. Doing it twice or three times with same article, is well... adjectives fail me. Voceditenore (talk) 06:21, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I try to think of it as a treasure hunt! Then again, I try that thinking with scooping the cat box and it never seems to increase my enthusiasm. Danger (talk) 06:37, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Help from Campus Ambassadors

Hey, I would just like to tell everyone present here that though we are not in the limelight, still we are well aware of the depth of the situation and tackling the current WP:COPYVIO situation. As an example, though I am currently on WP:Wikibreak due to my exams, I decided to come out and bring forward the fact that we CA's are trying everything to get the situation under control. I myself had been maintaining a list of copyvios and their current status User:Debastein1/Detected Copyvios. Unfortunately, as I am a student, I had to pause to resume my preparation for my exams. A lot of the other CA's are also preparing for there exams, hence, they might seem a bit inactive now. Understand, the whole fleet of CA's will be back in action very soon.

Thank you loads for the tireless hours all of you have been putting in just to detect copyvios, the passion is truly inspirational. I am deeply aware about the different problems you are all facing and the burden of it all. Please do hold on, we are mounting a full attack on Copyvios and hope to bring the situation under control very soon.

Thank you for not giving up hope on this program. Please revert back to me or any of the other CA's or OA's. Please leave a message on my talk page, even if you wish relay it to the whole CA list, I shall be obliged to do as such.
Debastein1 (talk)
"Lets make this world a better and more informative place" 19:07, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Bottom-up approach to the copyvio problem

As another way to try to get the message across, after deleting a copyvio I have started to add to the user's talk page warning: "Please read Wikipedia:Copy-paste and, if you are editing as part of a class project, ask your instructor to read it and to explain it to the rest of the class". JohnCD (talk) 14:51, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

That seems like a good idea, John. :) Wikipedia:Copy-paste is a lot easier to process than WP:C. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 16:20, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Update on IEP

I've put up an update about the IEP here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Update_on_IEP. I thought I'll share it on this page as well just incase you missed seeing it.Nitika.t (talk) 11:03, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

In case any of you are not informed, the following is a link to the complete list of students of the IEP.

• Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students

Debastein1 (talk) 10:52, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Is there a machine readable version of that list; if so, where? MER-C 12:34, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Are you looking for a plain-text list of student user names? If so I can generate one fairly quickly for you if you want. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:00, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Here is a list; I think it's fairly accurate but there may be a couple of errors -- let me know if so. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:44, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Good work - just what we need, but it needs to be a vertical plain list that can be manually imported into our watchlists. To keep it vertical and copyable, it should be enclosed in <pre></pre> tags. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 14:44, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I was promised a complete list of all students by the WMF in the IRC office hour, but after taking a closer look, Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students isn't it: some of the students do not have links to their userpages on Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students, which is what I'm really concerned about, along with the TBA section down the bottom.

Please tell me how you generated this list. It does have problems such as duplicates, only ~830 (non-unique) entries where participation is just under 1000 students, omissions such as User:Pratikshab.elec and incorrect entries such as User:Kiran Kandekar => User:Kandekarks.elec. The problems seem to be concentrated around the solid state devices section. Despite this, I'll find this useful for testing my CCI program once I start writing it. Thanks. MER-C 15:07, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I created it by pasting the page into Excel and tweaking for a bit; it took a bit longer than I expected -- about thirty minutes or more. I left in the duplicates because Excel treats different capitalization as duplicates and I think WP does not, so I thought it was safer. I should have removed rows that were truly duplicates -- sorry about that. I forgot about the pre tags; I was assuming someone would just grab the data from the edit window. I'll add the pre tags now. The missing students are probably ones that didn't provide a user page link, just a name -- I figured those were students who hadn't created a user page -- see this section for multiple examples of that. The solid state errors are because I missed the second column of user names -- if you have them, please go ahead and paste them into the sandbox; and feel free to update the sandbox with any other corrections. Otherwise I'll add those names later, when I have more time. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:18, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

• Can someone from the IEP please update Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students#Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics as soon as possible. This has many, many students listed with no links to their user names. I found 3 of them by chance and updated it, but there are many more left plus ones who's names link to non-existent accounts. Until you do that, it is impossible for the OAs who have been assigned to "emergency clean-up" to do their job. Many of the linked articles which the students are allegedly working on are wrong as well. So that's no help. That particular course is already very problematic with multiple and continuing instances of copyvio, blocked students, students recreating deleted articles which were duplicates of existing WP articles and/or reversing re-directs. Some students are still signing on as well. But of course they do it at their course page so the updates don't appear on Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students. Voceditenore - (talk) 19:06, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

There are other lists with mislinked students name as well, e.g. Computer Organization and Advanced Microprocessing. Many of the lists are in tables with no column to annotate the actions taken by those checking the articles and the Online Ambassadors names are not linked. At this point, the single most helpful thing the CAs and/or those running the program could do would be to give us a proper list to work from. I've also been told by one of the CAs that the instructor for Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics may not evaluate their work until November 18. Thus, it is highly likely that the students will be adding material right up to the last minute and it may apply to other classes in the Engineering College. - Voceditenore (talk) 13:31, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Update

For anyone who is watching the student lists and/or updating the tables, another IEP user has been blocked for repeated copyvio: User talk:Swapnil.dahake. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 13:04, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi all, I have personally gone through all the articles for the Indian Banking and Financial Systems subject SSE Year 2 Group A and SSE Year 2 Group B and have deleted most of the copyvios that I have found. I am terribly sorry if I missed any. I will do the same for Economics of Social Sector once my exams are over. If there is any other subject which needs immediate attention. Please do tell me if I can help.

As per deadlines, all the subjects in Symbiosis School of Economics in all years and groups will have halted as the deadlines have passed, i.e. it was on the 15th. Most of the students have also been graded. So you shall see very little activity esp since our exams are on and the term is ending.

My humblest apologies again if I have missed any copyvios. I shall go through them again after the 8th of November.

Regards. --Debastein1 (talk) 10:14, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

The blocked student was in Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics at the College Of Engineering, Pune. That class is proving very problematic and clean up is even more difficult because of the poorly maintained student list (see the previous section). Voceditenore (talk) 12:00, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism now

Vandalism to various student list pages has now begun by IP users who geolocate to India. I suspect that thee are students who are not logging in.

Would CAs please keep these class list pages on their watchlists and provide us with a single generic IEP student list that we can import into our raw watchlists.

If the vandalism continues, the IPs will be blocked and this will affect all computers on those networks.

--Kudpung ??????? (talk) 08:33, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

The copyright violations continue at large scale...

In the past few days students of the Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Computer Organization and Advanced Microprocessing course have been adding huge amounts of low-quality contents to the articles assigned to them. A large scale of the stuff I have inspected so far is copyrighted material lifted from text books and online sources (sometimes with minor changes), but it is impossible to keep up with inspecting and evaluating the edits at an individual basis, since there are so many. Also, some students have begun to reinsert stuff that has been deleted because of copyright violations. This is not tolerable and we must find a solution to this problem immediately. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

We've been begging for solutions for weeks now and regular Wikipedians who have volunteered to help with the painstaking work of copyvio tracing are now taking leave. Just warn the editors in the usual manner, list the affected pages and the editors here, and admins watching this page will review the situation and protect the pages or block the editors as required. Thanks for your help. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 10:10, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid, so far I have not found a single of those articles which has not been contaminated with copyrighted or suspicious material. As much as I hate to say this (because I very much support the idea to improve the education of the youth), it would probably be better to blindly revert any and all edits by these students carried out over the past weeks, or simply roll back the articles to the state before the start of the project and then reinsert those edits by others and the occasional good edit by those students. All in all, this would take several orders less time and effectively cause much less harm to the articles then trying to evaluate and clean up the articles on an edit-by-edit basis (always risking to overlook something) which would be painful work for weeks if not months. We could mass roll back edits on the basis of their missing edit summaries.

I really don't understand why students are continuing to add stuff like this up to the present - I mean, by now it must have been communicated to any of them more than once in no uncertain language, that copyright violations are not tolerable here or anywhere else. I don't know about other countries, but over here, if a student is found to trick in exams or to declare other people's work as his own, he would be expulsed from university. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:59, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Apparently plagiarism is a sign of respect in India. But yeah, it's beyond belief now. I strongly suggest reverting and/or sending stuff off to Wikipedia:Copyright problems, then forgetting about it. MER-C 12:42, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Plagiarism reflects well on the source copied in any culture (we just call it a citation count). However it's never a way to produce good articles, not even in India. I care less about the sourcing of these than I do about their low quality. Do none of these students read their pages after they've edited them?

We have to remember though that we're dealing with students. Students want marks, so they're going to act in a way to keep their immmediate tutors happy, far more than they'll care about some bunch at Wikipedia. We can't blame them for this. It's the tutors whose behaviour we need to change first. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:53, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ It's no good complaining here any more. Please list the pages and the offending editors here and it will be looked into by admins who are watching this page. To get anything done you will all have to lobby the two people who are apparently in charge of this project: User:Hisham who is ultimately respjnsible for the India programme, and is generally approachable and responsive, and User:Nitika.t, the second in command, who remains totally incommunicado. Failing that, bring your concerns to the attention of the directors of the WMF.--Kudpung ??????? (talk) 13:10, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Commons:User_talk:Nitika.t isn't encouraging. If the organisers themselves don't understand how something as simple as Commons image permissions work, then how can anything progress? This stuff isn't hard, it just indicates a lack of prioritisation to take it at all seriously. No user page should have both "I am a WMF Consultant" and no-permission deletions on it. If you want one, you first have to learn about the other. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:16, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

I have gone through the list of courses and if I haven't overlooked anything, there is now only one course deadline still open until November 14. I have therefore added the following box at the top of the course's page to remind the participants to stick to WP policies:

I also added two more items to their "todo list":

• Make sure the following code has been added to the top of the discussion page of any of the articles you edit(ed):

{{IEP assignment|course=Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses/Fall_2011/Macroeconomics|university=Symbiosis School of Economics|term=2011 Q3}}

This will create the following box:

• Make sure that you have added the following code to your user page:

{{User WikiProject India Education Program}}

This will create a small info box and identify you as participant in this program.

I don't know if this will help at all, but under the circumstances, we can at least try to bring this to the students' attention once more. And with such two weeks "advance warning" they should have more than enough time to adjust accordingly. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:16, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Question: Do these templates contain a script that populates relevant global categories for 1) IEP articles and 2) participants (students, organisers, online/campus ambassadors, cleaner-uppers)? --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 03:17, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Rudimentary:

{{Template:IEP assignment}} populates a category named "Category:India Education Program student projects[, <term>]" with <term> being a placeholder for the string "2011 Q3" most of the time.

The {{Template:User WikiProject India Education Program}} puts a user in "Category:Wikipedians in the India Education Program".

I'm not the author of these templates, but I agree, it could be useful to extend them to help us tag, group, organize and monitor the clean-up status of the articles and users. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 04:30, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

In addition to placing the IEP assignment template (with its parameters adapted accordingly) at the top of discussion pages of any mainspace articles (including redirects) I have found to be assigned to and/or edited by one of the students, I have also started to add the following new section at the bottom of those discussion pages where a quick look over the edit summary revealed that they have been edited by one of the students over the past weeks. This may help to raise attention to the problem among the readers:

---8X--- Snippet start ---8X---

== Look out for possible copyright violations in this article == This article has been found to be edited by students of the [[Wikipedia:India Education Program]] project as part of their course-work. Unfortunately, many of the edits in this program so far have been identified as plain copy-jobs from books and online resources and therefore had to be reverted. See the [[Wikipedia talk:India Education Program|India Education Program talk page]] for details. In order to maintain the WP standards and policies, let's all have a careful eye on this and other related articles to ensure that no material violating copyrights remains in here. --~~~~

---8X--- Snippet end ---8X---

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 05:00, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

I have now added the "IEP assignment" template and the "Lookout for copyvio" text snippet to all articles currently listed under Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Macroeconomics#Students. However, some articles have not been assigned to yet, are still missing or have been deleted already, so we'll have to monitor changes to this table or hope the students will add the template themselves. Also, we'd have to go over all the other courses and add this as well. Either way, this does not keep students from working on other articles (not listed in the table) as well (as has been the case with the other courses).

Given that this will amount to hundreds of edits, perhaps this can be automated so that we'd "only" have to compile a list of articles (or revise a tool-generated list of all pages edited by any of the students)? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:02, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

I can automate it. Just give me a neat list of pages and a message, and I'll do the rest. I'm not using a bot, though (I'm using the API with my account, this is allowed as long as I don't go too fast and check my edits) ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 11:31, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Here is a list of all the pages missing the IEP template on their talk pages. I will automatically edit them once my BRFA pushes through (I'd rather not check every single automated edit when I'm doing hundreds of pages, so it's better to get a bot account and do it). ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 15:34, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Nuking userspaces

I'm participating in copyright and general low-quality-edit-reversion cleanup that Nikita is organizing. The instructions she gave us were to first deal with mainspace edits, then with userspace edits. It has occurred to me that all of the userspaces should just be nuked (maybe in a few weeks to give the instructors the chance to do whatever they need to do?), perhaps with a note saying to ask an admin if you want it restored--at which point, a copyvio review could be performed. I don't think it's worth analyzing the userspace content page by page--better to delete it all. Calliopejen1 (talk) 15:30, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the policy aspects of nuking userspace pages before doing copyvio check - but you 're the legal-eagle and know best. I think we were basically organised here at community level to combat copyvio from the IEP long before Nitika fully understood the implications of the problems herself. At the root of the problem is the East/West culture dichotomy in respect of plagiarism issues. Nevertheless The western community has rallied round and done an excellent job, and in doing so has also significantly reduced the general patrolling backlog. The various comments around the site have however demonstrated that regular users are now getting tired and frustrated with this (I've spent over 100 hours on it myself), and the graph will now slowly creep back up. I sincerely wish Nitika every success with her endeavours. at ground zero, and she should not hesitate to communicate her needs to the community - preferably through open communication. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 03:11, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Checking for Copyvios

Hey all. I've been looking through Object Oriented Modeling and Design (an IEP course) and so far, almost every contribution I have found so far is a copyright violation. There are still articles to go through and several students have simply recreated the deleted content in their userspace and are using that for the course (still a copyright violation). I'm finding it overwhelming and could use some help with this course's article if not with its ambassadors and instructor. OlYeller21^Talktome 17:22, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

As a note, my work so far can be found here. The notes in the "Comments/Remarks" section are mine. If there's no note, it means I haven't checked the contents of that article yet. OlYeller21^Talktome 17:27, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

NOTE: For anyone not familiar with page patrolling methods, instructions for locating and checking copyvio are at WP:NPP - scroll down until you see the two yellow warning triangles. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:16, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Why are we encouraging this?

Just my 2 cents - but I can't believe we are tolerating this programme, let alone encouraging it. It is resulting in large-scale vandalism and is seemingly being undertaken purely for the benefit of the Indian education system - it is most definitely not benefitting the project. Wasn't this entirely predictable? Surely good content comes from editors who have taken the time to learn Wikipedia's policies and who have the willingness and expertise to contribute. If so, had these students spent time learning Wikipedia's policies before being compelled to write on their subjects? And have they any expertise in their subjects? It appears these edits are overwhelmingly from people who are not familiar with policy, who probably entered into the task without enthusiasm and who are using the exercise as a means to learn their subject rather than impart any real knowledge. Wikipedia is worse for it; the IEP is surely not enhancing its reputation either. RichardOSmith (talk) 17:49, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I think the project is salvageable and could be very valuable to everyone involved. It seems to me that there was a lack of planning as far as how things would play out. It seems like there was a grey area where a course would "use Wikipedia to teach" and that wasn't really fleshed out and if it was, I think that, as you pointed out, the issues could have been predicted and countermeasures set in place.

What I wonder is, is this the pains of making such a large step in a tangent direction that can be overcome or is the education program a project/program that won't ever work? I don't like the idea of never being able to make something work and I believe that this can be fixed.

I think we have two things that need to happen and we seem to be doing both but I'm not sure how organized the effort is.

1. - Quarantine the damage and work on correcting it. Compile a list of all edits/articles made by students in all education programs and sift through them for issues.
2. - Make sure it doesn't happen again. Design a system where ambassadors/institutes/instructors are held accountable for the actions of students. Also, design a system where all of the actions of students are easily monitored by those people and any editor who wishes to assist the program in checking for problematic edits.

I've seen other users doing great work on number one but students continue to make more problematic edits so it seems that number one can't be solved until number two is. Number two is much more difficult to solve. Holding people accountable on Wikipedia can be difficult given our jurisdiction. The question that keeps popping up in my head is if number one and two can be solved while the program is still in full swing and continuing to grow. The program may need to stop so that the current and future damage can be handled but as I believe we're still attempting to assess the damage, it's hard to make that claim without hard numbers. OlYeller21^Talktome 20:30, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

It's too late to stop it now: the deadline is November 18 (I think). I have volunteered to work on the first (still waiting for that list from the WMF) and next time around there will be a request for arbitration regarding the IEP before it starts; after all, the Wikipedia community has significant discretion over who edits here and what contributions to accept. MER-C 01:45, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that a request for arbitration will have any effect, or that Arbcom is even the venue for such a discussion. The WMF has a history of creating Foundation-wide projects without any consultation of the vast volunteer community, and has a more recent history of declining proposals for changes to page and image creation policy made by the various Wikipedia language communities that were reached by clear consensus following highly subscribed central discussions. However, this approach may be slowly improving, and some Wikipedians are now collaborating closely with the WMF to develop important new tools for page patrollers, and new users. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:28, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

The difference between this and WP:ACTRIAL is that ACTRIAL required the WMF server admins to change the wiki configuration (and they declined to do so). Similarly, MoodBar, AFT, etc. are merely interface changes: they do not change the actual content of the encyclopedia directly; it is the users who use these extensions that do. It's their servers, the WMF can run whatever software they want on them regardless of community opinion on the matter.

On the other hand, banning all IEP participants or deleting/reverting their contributions does not require a server configuration change. The Foundation cannot interfere with Wikipedia content unless pursuant to OCILLA or for other legal reasons. See also this comment from arbitrator Risker. MER-C 05:12, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up on those differences - it bridges an important gap in my understanding of the divide between the community and the WMF, and which is extremely unclear for most people. I read that post by Risker when they made it two weeks ago and it very neatly summarised the situation and the possibly policy issues behind it, although I didn't immedately appreciate some of the implications for the reasons you pointed out above. My concern is that as threads get longer, those who should take most notice, and in this case the WMF be they in the USA or India, only read the last post on a page when they finally sit up and take notice. I keep seeing and hearing statements such as 'We're listening to you all you and we're doing everything possible' both on and off Wiki, but it's the same kind of polictician-speak we get such as during the unprecedented summer riots across the UK, and the current flooding of the worst ever here in Thailand. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 07:36, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

This total fuckup mess has left me with an impression that colleges and universities in India don't care about plagiarism ("Copyvio" in WP jargon). In all most western universities and colleges plagiarism by a student results in expulsion and any lecturer that knowingly tolerates it also faces very serious consequences. IMHO the best solution would be to rollback all edits by all participants in this disaster experiment as soon as it is over. (It has also done nothing to improve my opinion of India as a nation.) Roger (talk) 12:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Having studied both in the US and India, I can verify that teachers here do not care about plagiarism. Most projects are directly copy-pasted, and the teachers don't bat an eyelid even when they know that it is copy pasted (Rather easy to tell when all the students turn in the same content). Bibliographies contain only google.com and en.wikipedia.org. So the fierce attitude towards plagiarism that starts at an early level in the US just isn't present here. And this same attitude was taken by granted by the WMF when they started the IEP (can't blame them...). So, where a long, scary session on plagiarism was needed, they probably just said "don't plagiarize" and left it at that. And it's not really the country's fault, either. Teachers just don't have the time to check assignments thoroughly (too many students to take care of), and would let sleeping dogs lie. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 15:46, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

One thing this whole mess has demonstrated is that Wikipedia is absolutely full of copyvio emanating from everywhere, not just these hapless Indian students. For example, I just checked Financial system because it had been edited by an IEP student. It consisted almost entirely of verbatim pastes from copyright publications and websites. However, while a small amount of this came from that student, the vast majority was long standing and quite flagrant. Interestingly, in 2009 the London Business School quoted (and credited) a part of the Wikipedia article in their Business Strategy Review, blissfully unaware that Wikipedia had simply lifted its pithy statement verbatim from Gurusamy (2008) Financial Services and Systems without crediting him. Voceditenore (talk) 17:42, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

WP:OTHERSTUFF is not a valid defence of this so called educational project that delivered a large "lump" of copyvio and other bad content. That is clearly distinct from the constant trickle of copyvio and vandalism that en.WP normally deals with on an ongoing basis. Has this project delivered even one GA, how about even just a B-class? Roger (talk) 18:44, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't using this as a defense of the IEP program, simply making an observation. I've been squawking like mad on the WMF page devoted to the IEP. One of the points I tried to make there was the same point you make. It's the sudden influx of nearly 1000 students in a short period of time, all editing in two basic areas who were ill-prepared and many of them struggling with written English. This was combined with completely non-participatve instructors, Campus Ambassadors who worked their heads off but were given an impossible task and unfairly placed in the firing line, and a complete failure to give any warning to En Wikipedia or engage with the WikiProjects who would have to cope with all. I believe one GA did come from it. Voceditenore (talk) 19:19, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

I think I've said this before, but doesn't anyone ever think to let those of us at NPP know about projects that will likely result in a significant number of new articles created? Had I known what was coming on NPP, I'd have 1. suggested this wasn't a good idea for all the reasons that ended up coming true (and gotten the same response as WP:ACTRIAL; pattern here?) and 2. read up a little on the subjects the students were working on so I'd know what I was looking at. As it was, I had to learn on the fly how to check for complex copyright issues, and my level of patience for people who write in near impenetrable English is decidedly thin from my 1 1/2 years of cleaning up after them on NPP (seriously, I defy anyone to find the next Indian village article and tell me how long it takes you to even make it a decent stub; I long ago lost count of the number). For all I've been told that more attention is being paid to NPP, people seem to forget that we're the ones who end up being gatekeepers, and you rely on us to some extent to keep a project of this size under control. The Blade of the Northern Lights (??????) 05:38, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I I had known this project was coming, I would have offered to go to India (it's not far from here and I have lived and taught there, and I also know a little bit about Wikipedia) and train the CAs properly and throw in some lectures for the students for good measure. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 06:56, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

IEP student and article lists and how to use them

Usable plaintext lists are now under construction from the tables of IEP users and their articles. These lists can be imported to your raw watchlist, and will show you:

• When a user has been warned.
• When an article is edited.

These lists will be available sometime today - watch this space. To benefit fully from your watchlist, if you are not already using it you should install the popup script. This will provide a rapid view of the contents of the recent revision when moving you mouse over '(diff)'.
I'll just repeat again, that admins are watching this page; if you feel that repeating offenders should be blocked, or pages should be protected, please tag the pages and warn the users as appropriate, and please a message here. Do note however, that blocking and protection will not be taken lightly, and will only be entertained in the most extreme cases - we must encourage new users to abide by the rules, and avoid driving them away with bitey actions and messages.
Please also take into consideration that some IEP users may not have sufficient knowledge of English to fully understand the implications of some of our TL;DR templates. An additional, more simple customised personal message may help. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:51, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Students and articles

I have prepared these lists from the raw data graciously stripped from the tables by User:Manishearth. These lists can be copied and pasted into your raw watchlists exactly as they are. They will only show if they are edited.
Students' talk pages are automatically added. If the talk pages show new edits, check for copyvio warnings or other warning messages. If there are 3 to 4 warnings, leave a message here or alert an admin.
If you want to break the lists down into faculties, please see User:Manishearth/Ambassador/IEPstudents and User:Manishearth/Ambassador/IEParticles. For your watchlist you must prepare the lists in the way they have been prepared below. If you don't know regex to strip the square brackets, ask me or someone else to do it for you.

Kudpung ??????? (talk) 12:47, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Missing: Expert System for Biometric Identification. --Chire (talk) 11:33, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Discussion

Woohoo! Fixed two errors in the users list and partially stripped duplicates (only identical strings, including case, were affected).

By the way, regex is not required to strip the square brackets: just find and replace with the empty string (that is, don't put anything in the "replace" textbox). MER-C 13:33, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Great work Kudpung. This is a huge step. Was this created by hand? OlYeller21^Talktome 14:24, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

User:Manishearth should get the credit for all the hard work stripping the table mark up. I just merged and cleaned up the lists. MER-C|MER-C is right about search-find-replace, but I always use a heavy text editor with lots of regex presets, so I didn't think about about it., and I didn't check for dups. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 15:18, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Do it by hand? Good gracious most certainly not! =P I used a bit of JS to make only the page content of this page show on the screen, then removed some extraneous stuff (using contentEditable), copied to Word, removed all columns except the username and article name columns, copy pasted back to Chrome, ran a bit more JS that extracted the article links and username links. Yes, it sounds a bit long, but it's a quite fast process (I did it in chunks to avoid mistakes, though).

For those of you who don't want to clutter your watchlists, here are separate watchlist-like pages for articles and students. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 08:54, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

What would really help is a tool that does "combined contributions" of users just like watchlists do "combined history" of pages. I was going to write such a tool a year ago (for helping OAs to keep track of their students), but I never got the time to do much. If anyone knows of such a tool, please post it here. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 09:33, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Many of the courses have such a tool linked at the top. Here is the one for my class. (Altered slightly to remove my edits.) Danger ^{High voltage!} 18:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Last night, I added some crosslinks to the master list at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students to make it easier to switch between the various tables (for comparison purposes / resynchronization). Thereby, I found two courses still missing there: "Development Economics Year 3 Group A" and "Research Methodology Year 3 Group B". I added the chapter headers and links, but haven't imported the data from the course sub-pages into there as I don't know if they are still up-to-date. So, this is just to remind you all, that the tables are still changing and any derivative lists (for watchlist import or tools) may still need to be updated on a regular basis as well. Please keep track of and explicitly document the import and export dates to make it easier to diff over the changes and resync. One more note: I saw that some user account names have been updated. If we find multiple accounts etc. for the same user, we should NOT remove the old accounts from the tables (unless they were clearly just typos), but just add the new ones as well. Otherwise we may miss some accounts in the cleanup work. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:34, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

(Removed remaining duplicates in the student list.) MER-C 10:22, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

This list also has non-existent users such as User:Abhishek Ajesra and User:Aau 74. Will these accounts be created or are they pipe induced errors? MER-C 11:38, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

It also omits the targets of redirect pages, which are the ones actually being edited. I discussed this at User talk:Kudpung and created a list of additional pages, but they have not (yet) been transposed here. RichardOSmith (talk) 12:04, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

We'll have to investigate both, the redirect page as well as the redirect target page, since sometimes the students have added contents to the redirect pages as well (which remains invisible for as long as the redirect was not removed). In either case, better to tag a page too much than to miss a page, IMHO. Ideally, when we tag articles, we should also add all the template parameters. While the template does not use most of the parameters now (except for display purposes), if the parameters are given, this could be centrally added at a later stage without having to edit all the articles again. I guess, we should do the same with the students template (at least adding a parameter indicating the course, so that we can later automatically group students by courses). Yet another parameter might indicate the cleanup status of the tagged article or user account. I might be able to spent some time improving those two templates tomorrow if noone else takes the task until then, but I'll be busy with other work until then.

The master list at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students is now fully cross-referenced with the lists on the individual course pages (don't change spelling of section headers, or this cross-linking will break apart). We'd now have to sync each pair of lists and verify that the master list is the most up-to-date version of them, and add to the master list whatever additional info comes up this way (at cursory look sometimes there are quite some differences), so that we can forget about the sub-sequent course lists afterwards (unless there will be occasional updates on them as well). We also should bring the tables on the master list into a uniform table format (it's a total mess right now) so that it becomes easier to script-export the data into whatever other machine-readable list formats we might need for more systematic cleanup work.--Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:05, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, a common format is a must.. Once you get there, I'll tinker the script to work with that format and paste it here (With a common format, running the script is a breeze). All I need for the script to work is the usernames, articles, and sandbox links(if you want those separated,too) in a fixed column (as in 1st, 2nd,etc). They can even be in the same column, as long as the column is fixed.

Oh, and whenever you want the lists updated, just let me know exactly what's been added, and I'll have it updated in a jiffy. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 14:37, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

I'd prefer to see the lists on the course pages simply be transcluded from the master list. That would save time keeping them in sync, however they have already diverged quite far, they need to be merged first. Also there are even more lists on talk pages (e.g. Wikipedia talk:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Data Structures and Algorithms#List of Prospective Articles). --Ruud 15:15, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Found IP address associated with IEP: 49.248.254.43 (talk · contribs) and added it to the list of currently unassigned accounts / articles at the bottom of the master list at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students. Added to temporary work list of accounts above: 49.248.254.43 (talk · contribs); Amitmunde (talk · contribs). Added to temporary work list of articles above: Ontology learning; RSA; Audio signal processing; Mechanical joint. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:16, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Redirects have been added here. They are on the same line as the original link, separated by a space. Please let me know when you want the list updated with redirects again. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 12:34, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Sock puppets?

Some of the students seem to have opened more than one account. We may need to keep track of this in the process to remove copyvios from articles. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:54, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Please list (suspected) multi-accounts / sock puppets here for further investigation:

• name: ???; course: Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Computer Organization and Advanced Microprocessing; accounts: user:Chaitanya.gayke, user:Chaitanya1.gayke; evidence: ???; status: both accounts blocked
• name: SHAIKH SHADAT; course: Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Machine Drawing and Computer Graphics; accounts: user:shadatls.mech, user:shadat88.mech; evidence: [11]; status: unknown

Please take user:shadatls.mech / user:shadat88.mech to SPI - certainly passes the Duck test - both working on steam boilers. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 15:34, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

 Done Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/shadatls.mech ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 09:15, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

More blocks

In spite of being blocked and unblocked, User talk:Sachinsuroshe has now been indefinitely blocked for copyvio. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 08:12, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we all know that that's going to lead to a sock popping up. These are students, with an assignment to do. If he can't edit under his original username, he's going to create a sock sooner or later. Too bad we can't have a "preemptive" SPI ;-) ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 09:23, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Ah, they were the student who repasted the copyvio over the warning I gave them! Danger ^{High voltage!} 18:26, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

User talk:Gunesh10 has been blocked for repeated copyvio. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 21:30, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

I'll be honest, as a CheckUser this entire concept is extremely frustrating. I'm seeing socks pop up all over the place, but so many of the accounts are on the same IP (I'm talking hundreds on one IP) with all very similar edits (since it is all part of a structured regiment) making it almost impossible to determine much of anything. With the added pressure to finish their assignments on time, we are almost encouraging them to sock if they end up getting blocked, mostly for copyright violations. Tiptoety ^talk 08:19, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Relief

The students of COEP have been given strict orders by their dean that if they put any further copyvios or sock puppetry, they shall be given negative marking. All edits are supposed to be stopped as of now and any further such edits on Wiki main space and/or sandboxes will invite heavy penalties in the form of negative marks. So for the moment, the flood of copyvios should stop and we need only remove what is existing only. Hope this news comes as some relief thanks to Hisham and Nitika who flew down to Pune and had a meeting with the Dean of COEP. Just got this news, hence passing it along. Debastein1 (talk) 11:24, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

I have put a detailed note regarding our meeting with the Director at CoEP here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune. Nitika.t (talk) 05:45, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the update, Nitika. So, edits from COEP students should stop. But if the dates given on the various course sub-pages are accurate, they should have stopped by now already. The last deadline to work on the articles, as documented on any of the COEP course pages, has been the 2011-10-31. Were these deadlines changed informally without reflecting this on the corresponding course pages? More interesting, what about the other two schools involved, Symbiosis School of Economics and SNDT Womens' University? According to Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses/Fall_2011/Macroeconomics at least one of their courses still has a deadline on 2011-11-14. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:21, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't exactly know about COEP, I too think the deadline was till 2011-10-31, however, that why you probably had the surge of copyvios as users edited on the last date and subsequently, as per Wikipedia, it only clocks UTC timings, hence, here at India, the students get some time beyond 12 midnight the last date, approximately, 5hrs and 30 mins. I being a CA of SSE can tell you that all of SSE's courses have stopped and have been evaluated with the exception of one, i.e. the Master's Course, Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses/Fall_2011/Macroeconomics. So only further editing from COEP has been stopped in an effort to stop the rampant copyvios. The program is still active in other colleges as per schedule. Cheers, --Debastein1 (talk) 11:10, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

I guess its time to look through people's contributions.--Guerillero | My Talk 16:51, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Judging by the edits here, some users are still active (Wait for it to load and then scroll down a bit) ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 15:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Going it alone

Since it has become readily apparent that the leadership here is unable or unwilling to address the fact that most of the folk assigned to cleanup are (through no fault of their own) are grossly unprepared for finding copyright violations and addressing them, I propose that we divvy up the list ourselves. Perhaps each experienced OA ought pledge to cover an inexperienced OA's cleanup until the list is all covered? Or, I am loathe to suggest, we do this off-wiki so as not to expose those who have been put in such an impossible position to further embarrassment? At any rate, perhaps sign up below and we'll figure out what to do. Danger ^{High voltage!} 17:06, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I was under the impression that Nitika was asking OAs who have finished their section of cleanup to take on additional articles, and continue to distribute the work that way till all articles are accounted for. Isn't that what's happening? I've volunteered for additional articles; I haven't been given any yet but I expect I'll receive them soon. I wouldn't like to see work duplicated so even if we end up organizing the clean up here let's make sure it doesn't duplicate work Nitika is already doing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:15, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

As of the last communication I received from Nitika (via email, yesterday), I was not under that impression at all. She is encouraging the OAs who have not started (many, I imagine, because they don't know what to do) to do so and also the CAs (who are equally inexperienced) to step in. Perhaps, though, you are receiving different emails than I am. Danger ^{High voltage!} 18:01, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I think all of this should just be done according to a standard WP:CCI, with standard community participation. The way Nikita's set it up makes it impossible to audit particular diffs, and most users aren't timestamping their comments so who knows what offending content has been added by then. Let's just have User:MER-C put together a big CCI report when he has time, and work from there. The OA thing is pretty useless. Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:44, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Good point. I think you're right. Should the OA bit just stop, since it will all be taken care of through CCI? Danger ^{High voltage!} 19:03, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I would be willing to take on a set of articles if I was given a list to work through. --Guerillero | My Talk 22:11, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I thought it had been recommended that Nitika and organisers to keep their messages more in the open and use talkpages.. Most of the problems with this programme are due to the organisers' lack of communication and not letti,ng people know who is in charge. In fact it is still totally unknown - except that Frank Shulenberg has overall responsibility for the Global Education Program. The organisers have known about these problems for over 6 weeks and it's only now, when the project is at an end, that they do somethiong about it. Who chose these ambassadors, who trained them, and who trained the trainers? Kudpung ??????? (talk) 23:10, 4 November 2011 (UTC) Ambassadores?

You can lead a horse to water, etc. Danger ^{High voltage!} 23:45, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Kudpung, you're saying that "Most of the problems with this programme are due to the organisers' lack of communication and not letti,ng people know who is in charge". Fact is that students at the two colleges in Pune continued to add copyrighted material to Wikipedia even after the 20 in-class sessions about copyright took place. I don't see how "letting people know who is in charge" is an answer to the question why the students behaved that way. And this question is not just a rhetorical question, it is something that I believe is at the core of the problem. Also: "Who chose these ambassadors, who trained them, and who trained the trainers?" doesn't answer the question. In my opinion it is too easy to blame the Ambassadors in Pune for the failure. They went to the classroooms, pulled up students' copyright violations on the screen and showed them why the edits were copyright violations. Campus Ambassadors reached out to students desk-by-desk in class, by email, by text, by Facebook messages, and any other way they could think of to encourage students to stop adding copyrighted materials to Wikipedia. Our Campus Ambassadors begged students to not add copyvios to Wikipedia, but some students simply would not or could not understand. This is what I think should be analysed. Also, I agree with you that our communication with the community was poor. I apologize for that. We tried for too long to fix the problem instead of just admitting that it was better to stop the students from editing. That said, I'm deeply frustrated about the outcome of the pilot. At the same time, I thank every community member who helped us along the way. As a Wikipedian, I know exactly how much we all care about keeping Wikipedia safe and its quality high. I always assume good faith when it comes to interacting with someone else online. I hope this is a mutual principle that guides us today and in the future. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 22:11, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi Frank. I'm not laying the blame at the feet of the ambassadors for one moment, but as my table below clearly demonstrates, there were gross miscalculations in the way they were selected and trained. I am fully aware that they were doing their best within the confines of their preparation for the project and their availablity, and I wrote to each one of them personally when the problems became acute. From the USA end, the huge cultural dichotomy also appears not to have been taken into consideration. The communication issues I mentioned were those between the WMF, and the community who did not really know whom to address, and were, perhaps, understandably unaware of the parallel page at WikiMedia - as a result, for a short while, my own talk page became the node of communication, and this shouldn't happen. The impression that the community has been receiving is that the WMF carries out whatever experiments it likes, and possibly employs inexperienced staff to do some of the organising, in the knowledge that they have thousands of volunteers who will clean up the mess. Plenty of warning signs were made weeks ago but were only taken seriously when I started the ball rolling by blocking the IP of one of the faculties, but only last week just before the project was due to end anyway, was anything of consequence undertaken. I was able to dedicate a lot of my online time to the clean up due my being (almost) in their time zone, and experience drawn from many years of working in education in Asia and India. Most of our volunteer community is asleep when the Indians are working; editing was not confined to students' creations, many other existing articles were edited by them, and there is still no exact way of knowing how many articles, sandboxes created in mainspace, or edited articles that were missed by the patrollers are still lurking unflagged in the NPP backlog. I sincerely hope that the next phase of the IEP will have learned from the mistakes, and I will of course continue to offer as much help as I can in any way possible, and perhaps as a result, we can also step up the development of the Article Creation Flow, and the Zoom that I am working on in close collaboration with the WMF. Kudpung ??????? (talk) 02:51, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Kudpung,

I highly appreciate the support you've provided thus far and I am more than happy about your offer to help in the future. That said, I feel that statements like "the WMF carries out whatever experiments it likes [...] in the knowledge that they have thousands of volunteers who will clean up the mess" are not in line with the principle of "Assume good faith". I am assuming good faith when it comes to you or anyone else who's involved in this discussion. And I hope that you are assuming good faith as well. If this is not the case, please let me know.

The idea behind the Pune pilot was to increase the overall number of editors and their diversity. This is based on the fact that editors from India are underrepresented on Wikipedia. If our common goal is to make the sum of all knowledge freely available, then nurturing underrepresented groups is the right thing to do. That's why the volunteer community in a collaborative process (http://strategy.wikimedia.org) decided to make India, Brazil, and the Arabic-speaking areas of the Middle East and North Africa high-priority targets.

With that said, I would like to learn more about why you think that your table demonstrates the shortcomings of the selection and training of the Campus Ambassadors in Pune (who's role is to teach the students basics like how to create a useraccount on Wikipedia). I have to admit that we did not get Online Ambassadors (who's role is to provide that crucial on-wiki role of assisting students) in place fast enough. That's among the many lessons that we have learned from this pilot. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 03:45, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

It is news to me that the CAs were merely to introduce students to the basics. I think the confusion regarding the roles of the various members of this program is understandable, given the information's the information available publicly.

I can speak only for myself, of course, but I think what you are seeing is not a failure to assume good faith, but a failure to assume competence. I don't think that ignoring the resource that is the en.wikipedia community was intentional. I don't think using non-transparent methods of communication was intentional. I don't think that failure to take into account historic pitfalls met even by enthusiastic South Asian editors was intentional. I don't think gross underestimation of what it takes to guide new editors was intentional. I think these are all the result of well-intentioned plans by staff very unfamiliar with Wikipedia that certainly ganged agley. Danger ^{High voltage!} 04:58, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I should clarify that the link I gave above is where I got when I went to the outreach.wikimeda Campus Ambassador page. The caption is "Visit the page on your country's Campus Ambassador program to get more information about the role's responsibility..." Danger ^{High voltage!} 06:26, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Danger, I see where the confusion comes from. Let me try to clarify the roles of the Campus and the Online Ambassadors.

Campus Ambassadors provide face-to-face assistance to the professors (e.g. when it comes to how to implement Wikipedia into the curriculum) and to the students (when it comes to basic Wikipedia skills and rules, e.g. how to create a user account, or what Wikipedia is/is not). Based on what we've learned in the Public Policy Initiative (our pilot in the US), Campus Ambassadors can be trained. You don't have to have 20,000 edits+ to explain to 20 students how to create a user account on Wikipedia. Actually, we've found that the opposite is true: people who've learned a skill like user account creation quite recently, have a better understanding of the pitfalls than someone (like me) who created his user account back in 2005.

Online Ambassadors, on the other hand, are usually well-seasoned Wikipedians. They know all the knitty-gritty details of Wikipedia's rules, policies and guidelines. They guide the students on-wiki.

Here's one challenge that we were facing when we started the Pune pilot: whereas the Campus Ambassador group is open (and I hope everybody here agrees that openness is one of our core values), the Online Ambassador group as we started it in the Public Policy Initiative is somewhat closed. That means, there's only a limited amount of Wikipedians who are interested in serving as Online Ambassadors. And, actually, I can totally understand that - my own main participation on Wikipedia is to write articles. I've been a mentor to new editors for a while and I've enjoyed helping newcomers, but in the end, I enjoy writing articles the best. And I guess, nothing is wrong with that. But on the other hand, we would like to see the program as a whole grow. We had fantastic results in our U.S. pilot. Students improved the article quality significantly and the joint Campus / Online Ambassador system worked really well. Now, what we've done in India, was an attempt to open up the Online Ambassador group as well. We divided the Online Ambassador group up: into a) experienced Wikipedians and b) newly trained Online Ambassadors. The experienced Wikipedians were supposed to function as the online experts (comparable to the U.S. Online Ambassadors) whereas the newly trained Online Ambassadors were supposed to only give basic assistance. Here's three mistakes we made: (1) It took too long to get the Online Ambassadors on board. (2) The exact role of the newly trained Online Ambassadors has not been as clearly defined as needed. (3) We should have thought about a channel to communicate the concept and background information that I'm giving you now.

As I've said earlier, I am deeply frustrated with the outcome of the pilot project in Pune. And again, I apologize for the additional workload that everybody had. At the same time I'm growing weary of simplistic explanations that lay the blame on a specific group (like "the Campus Ambassadors are to blame", "WMF staff is to blame"). As far as I can see, the situation is far more complex. None of the easy explanation attempts answers the question as to why the students kept adding copyrighted materials after 20 in-classroom sessions had been held, and after the Ambassadors were communicating the fact that adding copyrighted material is not allowed through all channels available to them (in-person, email, Facebook, etc.).

Again, my main interest is to understand the problems we were facing better. I believe we have to go through a thourough analysis of what worked well and what didn't. And I also believe that this is not only a huge challenge, but a huge opportunity to learn and to get better. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 15:08, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Frank, I understand how deeply frustrated you must be by all of this. But no one here has been giving "simplistic explanations that lay the blame on a specific group"--least of all ones that lay blame on the Campus Ambassadors. Criticising the training they had, the impossible workload they were given, and the fact that they were left in the firing line because for weeks no one else involved in the IEP would communicate here is not the same as laying the blame on them. And for the most part, the discourse here (and even more so at the WMF talk page) has been far from "simplistic". It has been quite nuanced and has pointed out ways that will help you to understand what went wrong and why. Voceditenore (talk) 19:09, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Frank: I don't think it's much of a mystery why there was so much copyright violation. It's clear to most of us that the Pune students don't have the language skills or training in original expression that editing in this project requires. This could have been determined by a small pilot with a few students in one class or even by a review of edits by Indian editors over the last few years. The questions I'd suggest looking into are what assumptions were made that led us to loose thousands of unprepared students into the project and why we so greatly underestimated the level of support it would require. Jojalozzo 20:37, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I fully understand the principles of expanding global knowledge - that's why I have been living here in Asia these past 13 years, and although I am now sem-retired, I still speak at colleges and conferences around the region, and massively plug Wikipedia too. I think if there were a lack of good faith I would have abandoned my collaboration on Wikipedia a long time ago instead of investing 100s of hours on this IEP programme, and dozens of others working in close collaboration with some of your senior executives on the development of other urgently needed solutions. I was merely summarising the sentiments that are echoing along the virtual corridors of the community.

We do not have the luxury of immediate communication and knowing who is in charge by sharing the same real life office space. I am sure that if there was community approval for a Global Education Programme, it was not tendered in the anticipation of the enormous workload it would present to an unprepared a group of people on the factory floor who can barely keep up with the normal day-to-day management of new pages, of which already nearly 80% of the daily intake are destined for the bin. This, and the cultural dichotomy appear to have been completely overlooked during the initial panning stage, as well as bringing some instructors onto the scene who have notion of teaching methodology. I questioned the training that was given to the CAs, who trained the trainers, and under whose authority: who's role is/was it to teach the ambassadors basics like how to create a useraccount on Wikipedia? The table below clearly demonstrates that something was very wrong - the only way to learn how to be part of the editing community of Wikipedia and adopt some responsibility for it is through hands-on experience - and that is not gained in a day and 5 edits, we expect more, much more, from our autoconfirmed users and rollbackers. Not only have the CAs made copyvios themselves, but apparently some of them with slightly more knowledge have explained to the students how to evade their blocks by socking and the use proxy servers. --Kudpung ??????? (talk) 06:02, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Let me jump in here, as well. Kudpung, you're absolutely right that the Pune pilot this past semester has put enormous workload on the community - I completely acknowledge that, and want to echo Frank's sentiment that we are very grateful for the work that community members (like yourself) have had to shoulder. It was not our intention by any means to put such a workload on the community. I believe this outcome was the result of two big mistakes that we made. One, we should have run a much smaller pilot - our original plan, actually, was to have only a few hundred students maximum in the Pune pilot (since it is a pilot), and the number of students increased significantly beyond our original intention when more Pune professors than expected signed on board the program because they were really excited by the value of Wikipedia-editing assignments (this level of interest and excitement is very nice by itself); in retrospect - and as one of our main learning points from this past semester - we should have put a stricter and smaller cap on the number of students involved in the program, especially since it is still in the pilot phase.

The second mistake we made was that we brought the Online Ambassadors on board too late. As Frank mentioned above, the role of Campus Ambassadors and the role of Online Ambassadors are very different, and entail different requirements and expectations. In the highly successful U.S. pilot last year ("Public Policy Initiative"), Campus Ambassadors introduced students to the basics of Wikipedia on a face-to-face level. Their role is not so much guiding students through detailed intricacies of Wikipedia-editing (like the more specific Wikipedia policies around blocks), but teaching students about the very basics, like how to create a user account, how to bold/italicize text, how to create a sandbox, etc. It is the role of the Online Ambassadors - who tend to be more experienced Wikipedians - to mentor students on more detailed Wikipedia-editing skills, including flagging policy violations and teaching students what exactly the policies are. I think you'll agree with me that there are a lot of policies and guidelines on Wikipedia - we expect the Campus Ambassadors to know the core, basic ones (like the Five Pillars) and to be able to explain these in beginner-friendly terms to students when they do in-class presentations, but it is the Online Ambassadors whom we expect to mentor students about any of the more advanced policies and also to do closer monitoring and hand-holding to ensure that students are in fact not violating any policies. We believe that this Campus Ambassador-Online Ambassador balance - with their distinct roles and expectations - is one of the main success factors behind the U.S. pilot last year. And in the Pune pilot this semester, we made the mistake of bringing Online Ambassadors on board too late (they weren't really on board until halfway through the semester). The result of this was that the Campus Ambassadors ended up having to do a lot of the things that we traditionally expect Online Ambassadors to do, including mentoring students on-wiki about more intricate Wikipedia-editing skills and policies, but the Campus Ambassadors' role should not have also included these things and the training they received in the summer did not adequately cover these skills because their role doesn't usually require them. In other words, the Campus Ambassadors were put in a situation where they had to help students in ways that Online Ambassadors are usually expected to help students. This was a big mistake on our part. To be honest, given this, I've been really amazed and impressed by what our Campus Ambassadors have accomplished in the Pune pilot this semester - despite being asked to do a lot more than originally intended, they still managed to run so many in-class presentations (which is part of the usual Campus Ambassador role), remain in constant communication with students and professors, stay united as a community, and maintain a cheerful, friendly, and hopeful spirit throughout the entire semester (including now!). I think that if I have to name "heroes" from the Pune pilot this semester, I would say that these very first India-based Campus Ambassadors are heroes.

These two mistakes I just described are serious ones, and are some of our biggest learning points from the Pune pilot. Please keep in mind that this semester in Pune was in fact a pilot, and that means that we went in expecting some things to go well and some things to not go well. Our top priority now is to thoroughly analyze what exactly tok place this past semester, and to strategize plans going forward based on these carefully-analyzed learnings. And we want the community's involvement in this analysis and planning. We'll make better plans with the community's involvement - I am sure of that. I apologize that much of the workload this semester has fallen on the shoulders of the community, and I really appreciate the work you and other community members have already done - I am confident that we can avoid a similar situation in the future, by correcting mistakes like the ones mentioned above and by doing comprehensive, community-backed analysis of the pilot. Annie Lin (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 02:06, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

• At this point, I think we should just wait until the CCI and do the clean-up via that. The CCI can't really start until we finally get a complete master list of all the students, and from Matthiaspaul's comments below, that may take some time. But if we try to do it piecemeal from the current Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students, we're just going to end up duplicating work, missing articles and students, etc. Some people will see a comment box already filled in and assume that was an up-to-date check, when in many cases it isn't at all. But that's not the worst of it. I honestly cannot understand what the IEP is doing here. They've apparently lined up some extra "Online Ambassadors" to help with the clean up, but some of them are wildly inappropriate. Even if they do start helping out, none of their work can be trusted--not because they are dishonest, but because they have no experience at all. Everything they do will have to be re-checked by someone else. Observe the following 6 OAs who between them have been assigned nearly 100 students to check:

1. Total edits: 1 (to their user page)
2. Total edits: 3 (all to their user page)
3. Total edits: 23 (only 4 to article space)
4. Total edits: 39 (all to article space, introduced blatant copyvio in 3 articles)
5. Total edits: 75 (47 to article space)
6. Total edits: 125 (29 to article space)

Voceditenore (talk) 15:23, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I told Annie Lin (WMF person who I got an email from first about this copyright cleanup, before I was emailed by Nikita) in the beginning that we just needed to do a CCI, but she didn't listen to me... (I'm an OA/CA so I'm on the email lists.) I'm not sure what Annie Lin's role is in all this BTW. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:26, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Who's Who

This is what I've managed to find. I had to click all over the place (user profiles, "What links here", page histories, and multiple notice boards on English Wikipedia, WMF's Meta-Wiki, and WMF's Outreach wiki) to find out even these basics.

• Barry Newstead is Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation and "oversees WMF's work in India"

• Frank Schulenburg is WMF's Global Education Program Director of which IEP is a part

• Annie Lin is WMF's Global Education Program Manager

• LiAnna Davis is Global Education Program Communications Manager

• Hisham Mundol is a WMF consultant and is running the India Programs

• Nitika Tandon is a WMF consultant and is "operationally in charge of IEP"

Two weeks ago I said at the WMF talk page for the IEP that for the sake of transparency and improved communication, this information should be put in one accessible place here on Wikipedia. No one took a blind bit of notice. So here 'tis. Voceditenore (talk) 18:18, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I thought I'd jump in here to comment on this -- although this is a WMF project, we are doing our best to make this a volunteer-run initiative. That means that the face of our project should be the volunteer Ambassadors, students, and professors, not WMF staff. The successes of the U.S. project are the successes of our volunteers, not the successes of WMF staff. In this case, however, the problems with the India program are not the fault of the India Ambassadors, but some design flaws in our pilot -- and that's what pilot projects are: chances to learn what works and what doesn't. Obviously, a lot *didn't* work with the India Education Program, and we have certainly been reading every word (yes, Kudpung, even if we just post at the end of the page, we have read every word above it!). Our names aren't on these pages because we don't want to take credit for success that isn't ours, that is instead the community's. But we certainly deserve the blame for flaws in the program design that have been illuminated here in the last few months. So I'm genuinely curious... where would you suggest adding our names to the pages so as not to overshadow volunteers when things are going well? -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

First, this was obviously not a volunteer run initiative, considering the failure of the drivers of the program to engage, consult with, or even inform the volunteer community, and the fact that the only volunteers (the Ambassadors) in the program were chosen by WMF staff in a sort of off-wiki job application process. (I should have known that that didn't pass the sniff test; the trouble with idealism.) So, I am unimpressed by your claims. Anyhow, in the event, heaven forbid, that a similarly Foundation driven program occurs in the future, creation of a "leadership" tab in the main page detailing the above information would be very helpful so that we could communicate regarding an en.wikipedia program on wiki with the people running it. Danger ^{High voltage!} 00:13, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Danger,

The fact that the first generation of Ambassadors was chosen by WMF staff does not mean that the Pune Ambassadors were not running this program as volunteers. And you are right - they've all gone through a very selective and rigorous application process and here is why: if you're a teacher and you are letting someone that you don't know very well come to your classroom and talk in front of your students, you have to have confidence that this person is going to do a good job. There's a lot of trust involved and we wanted to make sure that we only let people interact face-to-face with the students who deserve that trust.

Now, when it comes to leadership, the Pune Ambassadors selected someone amongst them to take on that role. In a collaborative effort, they agreed that Ram Shankar Yadav should serve as a key on-the-ground organizer in Pune.

Finally, I'm not convinced that the above list of names answers the question of why the students at the two colleges in Pune did not respond to the various efforts being undertaken to stop them from adding copyrighted materials to Wikipedia. That's why I suggest making a thourough analysis of the pilot our first priority.

However, I think your idea of creating a tab on the main project page could help. I would suggest to call this tab "contact" instead of "leadership", but I feel that's a minor point. The tab could list both a representative from the volunteers/Ambassadors and a WMF staff representative as first points of contact if some issue comes up. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 02:42, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Contributor surveyor finished

I finished the contribution surveyor yesterday, test output is here. Is the list of students final, all inclusive and error free? MER-C 02:57, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately not, for several reasons:

The "work lists" above are a very good starting point for watchlist import etc., but they can hardly be used for systematic work or even a formal copyvio investigation, as they are outdated and incomplete. The master list at Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students continues to see updates on a frequent basis. Further, there are still changes added into the individual course lists (f.e. Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses/Fall_2011/Machine_Drawing_and_Computer_Graphics#List_of_students), which don't get reflected in the master list (in some cases the lists have been sync'ed some days ago, but are already out of sync again). Finally, there are still students adding new contents to articles (such as, for example, here: [12] in the High-mast lighting article). They no longer edit under their WP user accounts, but work "under cover" as mere IPs now.

Any IP found to be associated with the IEP should be added to the section Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Students#Other engineering students / articles) in the master list. Some of these IPs are not static and have been used for edits unrelated to IEP as well, complicating matters...

All in all, the whole thing is still in flux, it seems.

The only way to get out of the dilemma, as I see it, is to sync the various lists and combine all the data into the master list and comment out (or otherwise "invalidate" or set to "read-only") the various then-no-longer-needed distributed lists on the course sub-pages immediately afterwards. But for this to work, the table format must be expanded and unified, so that no information gets lost and new info can be added. After all, we cannot simply delete the distributed course lists if they contain any information not found in the master table.

Realistically, I think, it is still days before we'll have anything near a complete and accurate master list.

One would think, that at least the local IEP instructors/ambassadors must have complete user info, as they know the students personally and can ask them questions, and because they'll need the info anyway in order to evaluate the students' work. I wonder, if they still work paper-based instead of using WP as their reference - if so, it might be possible for students to bypass the system and get their work evaluated without ever showing up on the course lists or in the master list, and we might stumble upon them only "by accident". --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:35, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Source of the article : Wikipedia