Wikipedia talk:India Education Program

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)

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)

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)

Queries from the Wikipedia community

See also: Wikipedia talk:Ambassadors § Concerns over impact on article quality

(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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 กุดผึ้ง (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)

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)

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)

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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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)

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` • talk 03:45, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

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 กุดผึ้ง (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)

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 กุดผึ้ง (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)

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)

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)

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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • contribs) 18:55, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 (話して下さい) 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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

NPP Sept-Oct 2011

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 กุดผึ้ง (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 (話して下さい) 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 • 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 (話して下さい) 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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.

students and articles

Students User:220.225.67.36 User:49.248.254.43 User:17shash User:110803004_rajesh User:110808020_nilesh User:110808028_amol User:110808049_nisarg User:111003046comp User:111008066it User:a20.nitin User:Aaditiac.mech User:Aamiya cchakraborty User:aanchal09 User:aau_74 User:abhi.nagarnaik User:Abhijeet Tak User:Abhijit User:Abhijit Aghao User:abhijit.digole User:Abhijitrs.mech User:Abhilasha369 User:abhinav_aggarwal09 User:abhinav619 User:abhipsa padhiary User:Abhishek Ajesra User:aditi symbiosis User:Aditi Wadekar User:Adityaarora20 User:Adityamoghe2011 User:adwait187 User:Aishani Sharma User:aishvora User:aishwarya.khosla User:aj45218 User:Ajinkya.domale User:Ajinkyarp.mech User:Ajit.Mali User:Ajitdmote11 User:akanksha.modani User:Akanksha08 User:akashasija User:akashpendkar User:akashprathi User:Akashrodge User:Akhil.kapoor2 User:Akshay Bageshwar User:akshay.ahire User:akshaybade User:akshaychandak78 User:akshayfp.mech User:ALX999 User:Amanchawla User:Amar.m1 User:AmeyaDahale User:Ameynv.mech User:Amit khadse User:Amitmunde User:Amitnakli User:Amol deshbhratar User:Amol.gulhane07 User:amolkchaudhari User:Amolkure.mech User:Amrutdeshpande User:Amtrathod19911 User:anaghajadhav User:anand devnale User:Aniket Bapat User:Aniket khade dabbang User:Aniketam.mech User:aniketcm.mech User:Aniketdp.mech User:Aniketpate User:Anjai Negi User:Anjalirl.mech User:anjana.sreekumar User:Ankit Damodar User:ankit.shende User:ankitajain1411 User:Ankitaks.mech User:Ankitamor User:Ankurjay007 User:annie_maverick User:anoojbhadu34 User:Antariksh.pant User:anu2033 User:Anujasp User:anupa.chakraborty User:Anuradha tupsundare User:Anurag acj User:Anusha96 User:apoorvanayak User:appledoc User:Arhit.SSE User:Ari.MSC User:aries0491 User:Arjunmangol User:Aroy009 User:Arpit_Speedster_CS User:arun.shetty User:arunrulz User:asahay15 User:ashakawale User:AshishDandekar7 User:AshitoshAlwani User:Ashutosh.ukey User:AshviniV User:Asmita yendralwar User:Atharvaborkar User:atul.lanjudkar User:atul903 User:atulnk11 User:Atulsingh05 User:Avinash sonwane User:Avinashdjadhao.coep User:Avinashgadekar User:Avinashsonwane7 User:Aviverma User:Awadhutmore User:ayeshasaifi User:b.suhasini User:BabyPoochies User:bana2231 User:basic.atari User:belapurerv08.it User:berneey User:bhagyashri.kantikar User:Bhaveshpatil04 User:Bhavika chheda User:Bhavikp19 User:Bhavna.jaidwal User:bhim.padalkar User:Bhotmangeth08.it User:bhushanmohite92 User:BhushanPatil.Mech User:Bluejazz6 User:bobadevishal User:borseashwini User:bugboy48 User:Burhanuddin Virpurwala User:bvineet User:chaitanya.gayke User:Chaitanya1.gayke User:chaitrali.joshi User:charanya.vish User:Charukeshi Joglekar User:Chetan Meshram User:chimidoma User:computergeekx User:Computersagar User:cos1432008 User:Cs0909 User:csnarkhede User:curiousitas User:dakshdhankhar User:debastein1 User:Deepa Sai A User:deepakg.elec User:deepika.sirsath User:deshmukhpratik User:deutkar ulhas User:devadyuti_nag User:Devanshi tripathi User:devendra thakur User:Devendrabp.mech User:Devikakannan User:devsoni User:Dhananjaysb.mech User:dhanashreevaidya User:DhirajkumarBJ10.mech User:dimpal User:Dipali Mahajan User:Dipti N User:diptuchaku User:div.tejwani User:Dnyaneshwar444 User:dpacsridharan User:dropnote User:ds731992 User:Durgasj.mech User:dvka005 User:epistemphobic User:examsandacademics User:fadnaviska User:FazilaGirkar User:Gachasupri User:Gaikwadss.mech User:Gajanan2011 User:Gajanandc.mech User:Gajugarve User:gakiwate User:Ganesh A Bhise User:Ganesh Kumbhar User:ganeshbiradar93 User:GARAD.VIJAY User:Gargi Pingale User:gaurabr User:GauravKeskar User:Gauri Vaidya User:Gayathri28 User:Geetanjalikatare User:girishsk.mech User:Goldlionist User:Gopal Sarda CS User:grainbrain User:gunesh10 User:Hahaharsh User:haley.rohl User:Harichandra Darade User:harsha.dabhade User:Harshad Choube User:harshadsamant User:harshadwaghmare User:Harshalb.mech User:Harswiks User:Hemlatak.elec User:hemsvasu User:hilburt User:Hitendrashukla User:hiteshreep.mech User:hpSSE User:Hsben User:hussain a tamboli User:ingaleashwini User:Investorkaytan User:ipsidel User:Irfanhamidk User:ishankute User:IshitaMundada User:Ishq2011 User:Ishwar Gajanan Kurwade User:ittisha User:Jagdishpawar User:Jagruti Khivasara User:jainyz User:Jayantgolhar User:jayantramanand User:Jayeshmore77 User:jha.preeti25 User:jinchurikidan User:jiteshchougule User:jk.90 User:Joannegr.mech User:Jobin RV User:joshianurag21 User:jsubha User:jyothivenugopal User:jyoti bansal User:jyoti.khenat User:jyotilanghi User:jyotsna.maddhukuri User:kajalpkhatri User:Kalyani Kulkarni User:kalyani.chandola27 User:Kalyanidd.mech User:Karan.csn User:karan2211 User:karankokane User:karanlalchandani User:Karishma Patil User:Kartikeyagadakh User:Kaushik Panditrao User:Kaustubh85 User:Keyur2808 User:khandarenb.it User:kharosekarcv.mech User:Kiran Kandekar User:Kiran.mech User:Kishorgadekar User:kittu999 User:kj.arsenalrocks User:Kmsarda User:kore mayank User:Lakshmi.nuthakki User:Lenyannabraham User:Lokesh Bais User:Lucky User:Madhurbajpai User:madhurinagare User:Madhusudandad User:Madura Potdar User:Mahale deepak User:mahendrabg.mech User:Mahesh Lekurwale User:Mahima.chawla User:mailgkhandelwal User:Maithiliy User:MalharPunde User:Mallika.sharma User:Manali Agrawal User:manasi chaudhari User:mandar.joshi10 User:mangalvedhegk User:manghatpranav19 User:Manojkumar.R.S User:manorite221 User:Marris's Managerial Theory of Firm User:Maverick02 User:Mayank.kulkarni User:mayur.popade User:mayur642 User:Mayuri dabi User:mayuri.sandhanshiv User:mayuri.sapre User:Mayurimk.mech User:Mayuris.elec User:Meenakshi10 User:Meera Mudholkar User:Megha92 User:mehulgavit User:Merrynjoy User:mihir mahajan User:Minakshinajardhane User:Minal bidave User:minalmitkar25 User:misalvs User:Mishra Prem User:Mjshinde User:mohan.bharati User:mohan.chanpur User:mohini.c User:mooseclan User:more_kalyani User:mridul.minz User:mrigankachaturvedi User:MrinmayeeHingolikar User:Mrunal08 User:Mrunmayee.halkunde User:msaibalwar User:mystique_nm User:naiksanketsanjay User:nalawadec User:nammu_wiki User:namratakacholia User:naresh.limbu User:natashasarangi User:navchic User:navneet.sse User:neepunpp.mech User:neerad92 User:Nehali Shinde User:Nehasj.mech User:Nehavnaik User:nejal User:Nejal mehta User:Netra Nahar User:nidhigandhi User:Nikhil Birnale User:Nikhil Zambare User:Nikita Shetty User:nikita.kalyani User:nikitabhutada User:NikitaPSolanki User:Nikitard.mech User:nikitym User:nilangipatil User:Nileema Kamble User:Nileshmm User:nileshsd.mech User:Nilima kale User:nimmalik77 User:Nipunbayas User:Nirupama267 User:Nishant Ravichandran User:nishantdchaudhari123 User:nishantSSE User:Nitesh Sonawane User:Nitin Tangade User:Nitish Pandya User:nitishps User:Nk110808012 User:nmkirpalani User:NNKarnani User:nupur.choudhary User:nupuragrawal3 User:Om.Narayan Om User:Omkar Yarguddi User:Onkar270 User:Padmini.krishna User:Palak verma User:Pallavi Chaudhari User:pallavi.meshram User:pallavi.sonawane User:Pankaj bagul 3037 User:Pankaj marghade User:Pankajpd.mech User:pareenwakde User:parekh.raj User:parthiv.ravindran User:pas007 User:patil sankalp User:Patilgs10.mech User:Patilvs.mech User:Pavan Jape User:pavandandewad User:pawan.gholap User:Pigou_51 User:pinglekp User:piyu User:Piyusha Kukade User:Piyushshekdar19 User:PJote User:Podutwarsamiksha User:Pooja goyal User:poojalh User:Poojanemade User:Poojasb.mech User:Poonam7393 User:poonamjadhav User:poredi.nihal User:potpourr!^_^ User:Powerpuffgirl21 User:Prabin Das User:Prachi.munde User:prachicoep User:pradiq009 User:pradnyaboinwad User:Prajakta Faithfulwar User:prajcoep User:Prakash waghmode User:prakriti prabir kar User:Pralesh Pawar User:Pranav_tane User:pranav.patwardhan User:PranavAmbhore User:pranavbijwar User:pranavpnaik User:Pranaykhobragade07 User:pranit93 User:Pranita Madke User:Prasad dhole User:Prasad Koolkarni User:prasad.manoj User:prasannjit.gondchawar User:prash920523 User:Prashant Londhe User:prashantgonarkar User:prashantrayarikar User:Prathamesh Deshpande User:pratik_110808063 User:Pratiklahoti8004 User:Pratikmetange User:Pratikmv.mech User:PratikNadagouda User:Pratiksha Bhamare User:Pratikshank.mech User:pratiktitar User:Pravin Chavan User:Pravin nexus User:pravinkokate07 User:Preetykondyal User:prerana2592 User:Prerna Chowhan User:prithvi9292 User:Priya pipada User:Priya Tejankar User:priyadarshini chakravarty User:Priyanka Gangurde User:Priyanka Medhe User:Priyankab.elec User:priyasara User:ptwondereco User:punamk.etc User:purplepapayas User:purplesky91 User:rachana.sane User:radheshgc User:radhika.more User:Rahilfirdaush User:Rahulbhalerao001` User:Rahuld.elec User:Rahulsavale User:rahulvijaykulkarni User:RahulWaghamare User:rai_kolkata User:Raj65 User:raj2026 User:Rajan gidwani User:rajaratna.pradhan User:RAJATPASARI User:rakhiranglani User:Ram Dixit User:Ram Gabale User:Ram548 User:ram1992 User:Ramakant sul User:rameshrakshe User:ramprasad.shendge User:ranadeas90 User:Rangilo_Gujarati User:rasha09 User:rashmi.baruah User:rashminarayan User:Rasika mantri User:Rasika23 User:Rathodgs.mech User:ratulsen2006 User:Raviraj V. 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Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:34, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

 Done Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/shadatls.mech ManishEarth^{Talk • 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 • 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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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 กุดผึ้ง (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)

Extended content

From the list at w:en:Wikipedia:India Education Program/Campus Ambassadors Source: X!Tools 4 November 2011 Note: In all cases, the vast majority of non-mainspace edits was to the user's user page. User 1st edit Total edits Mainspace en:User:Gsinghglakes 18 September 323 21 en:User:Ramshankaryadav May 696 41 w:en:User:Seva.panda 3 June 14 1 w:en:User:Arnavchaudhary June 117 23 en:User:Wasimmogal2007 12 Sept 2010 316 6 w:en:User:Pallaviagarwal90 28 August 109 10 w:en:User:Mihir.khatwani June 240 20 w:en:User:Tambeparag July 171 86 w:en:User:U.raghavendra June 39 6 w:en:User:AbhiSuryawanshi May 343 59 w:en:User:Rangilo_Gujarati February 1,210 206 w:en:User:ALX999 May 79 8 w:en:User:Mihir_Kelkar 31 August 9 3 w:en:User:Pratiklahoti8004 July 532 51 w:en:User:Gunit31 August 137 28 w:en:User:Devanshi_tripathi August 571 278 w:en:User:Anurag_acj 25 July 128 22 w:en:User:Vaibhavchandak 28 July 172 43 w:en:User:User:Debastein1 24 July 838 133 (user 244) w:en:User:Vedantgupta7890 29 July 117 62 w:en:User:Minakshinajardhane 27 July 128 28 w:en:User:Nikita.agarwal 21 August 137 51 w:en:User:Shefalinaik 28 July 73 19 w:en:User:Roshnisaigal 30 July 188 96 w:en:User:Ishu.aghav 3 September 28 6 w:en:User:Arjunmangol 30 July 302 45 w:en:User:Tb0412 8 July 93 39 w:en:User:Kumarvikramsingh 6 September 29 3 w:en:User:RDebashruti 21 August 29 2

• 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)

Community work load

NPP backlog 4 Nov 2011

I think this graph clearly demonstrates the massive action by volunteers to clean up someone else's mess.

Now that the word has got round that the IEP has been (partly) closed, the backlog is again on the increase.

Today, there is only 1 (one) patroller on duty...

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who rolled their sleeves up.--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:20, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I think I checked more pages than a copyright attorney this past month, though some of it was also existing articles. I got one hell of a crash course in picking out close paraphrasing and copies from multiple websites. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:26, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Ha! me too! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:00, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Pilot program?

I am having difficulty understanding how a supposed pilot program was able to grow so large and out of control. The whole idea of a pilot is that it is small, contained, and doesn't risk resources. Continuing to refer to this giant fiasco as a pilot strikes me as minimizing rhetoric rather than the thorough review of a deeply flawed process that we need. Jojalozzo 02:39, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Roughly 20,000 registered accounts made more than 10 article space edits in September. source This program was intended to add 1,000 new editors at that roughly that level of activity, an increase of 5%. Make of that what you will. Danger ^{High voltage!} 03:06, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

- a frightening proposition indeed, and serious enough to firmly insist on a delay before the next phase starts. What's going to happen ulmtimately, is that with all the other issues with the WMF this year, the regular community is going to be extremely skeptical of wanting to offer any more help. I had a silly comment from another admin yesterday that wrecked my day so I sat next to my pool in the tropical sun for the rest of the afternoon and mused over whether we are shouting into the void, or if what we do here is worth it at all - it's sowieso only a drop in the (Indian) ocean, and nobody is listening to the drips (pun). --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:57, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

That "5%" looks soothingly manageable, until you consider that, unlike most of the 20,000, the thousand new editors (a) are quite new to Wikipedia, (b) in many cases, it seems, are not fluent in English, (c) do not seem to have been given even a rudimentary briefing on things like wiki markup, sandboxes, and copyright, (d) are "supervised" by people with equally little WP experience, and (e) are given deadlines to contribute. JohnCD (talk) 13:15, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

...and, another important difference: the 20,000 are volunteers, here because they want to edit. The 1,000 are pressed men, they have to edit or they fail their course. JohnCD (talk) 22:17, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Plus, they have been assigned (well, have to choose one, thats not much better) a random topic from a field they're still trying to pass. They are not experts at all. Regular Wikipedia contributors usually write because they know a lot about a subject, not because they randomly picked this article as a "least effort" topic to write about. If you know a lot it's usually much easier to write yourself; if they don't really know enough, people tend to copy&paste. --Chire (talk) 08:50, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Common format

Ok, let's get this underway. We need to figure out a common format for all the tables at WP:IEPS so that we can keep the machine-readable lists updated.
I suggest these columns, in this order: Rollno, name, username, articles, sandboxes,mentor,approval/sign,instructor,OA, OA comments, other columns. Most of the tables just need to be rearranged, but some of the tables have double columns (see this for an example). I'm all for removing the extraneous columns like approval/sign and instruction (they all have the same content), but I don't want it to inconvenience the profs. Course pages should have their tables replaced with links to the sections of WP:IEPS.
We should also decide places to keep master machine-readable lists (For the moment, these are User:Manishearth/Ambassador/IEPstudents/rcl and User:Manishearth/Ambassador/IEParticles/rcl) Once this is done, I can easily keep them in sync, as well as run redirect checks, etc. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 16:45, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

In regard to the table rows with multiple students, it would be possible to create separate rows for each student and still combine their shared data into multi-row table fields for stuff like articles they worked on, etc. This way, we could bring the tables into a uniform format without loosing the info that some users formed groups to work on articles. The down-side is the more complicated table syntax. (If we want to avoid the more complicated syntax, we could, in a first pass, add separate rows for each student and just fill up the shared columns with something like "see above". This way, the table format could be kept simple and straightforward to edit (and parse on source code level).) Comments?

An alternative might be to create a special {{Template:User IEP|accountname=|realname=|rollno=}}. However, the real name and roll number is mostly don't care for our cleanup purposes. Ideally, this kind of information should be part of the user account info or stored in a template on the corresponding user pages and extracted from there by another template, so that it can be centrally maintained as part of the data object "user", not "course". So, while it might be a good idea to have something like this in future programs, it would only increase our work now for no immediate benefit, it seems. Comments?

Should we add a special comment column for our cleanup efforts, or just use a generic comment column as we already do now?

Do we need to have special columns for cleanup status info, such as "user page has been tagged with IEP template", "all discussion pages of articles edited by user have been tagged with IEP assignment template", "all articles have been evaluated, reverted and/or cleaned", always with date stamp, or is this kind of info no longer necessary and will be maintained elsewhere as part of a formal CCI investigation process?

Additional notes:

In order to avoid ambiguity I would like to suggest that we all stick to use the well-established ISO 8601 standard international date format in the comments column, that is "yyyy-mm-dd", example: 2011-11-06 for November 6th, 2011. No abbreviated 2-year forms, no national date orders, no non-standard separators, only hyphens (as per the standard). Using the ISO format, we no longer have to wonder if something like "11/10/11" now means November 10th, 2011 or October 11st, 2011 (and if we didn't already knew we are talking about 2011, there would be even more ways to interpret this).

If we don't create a special user template (s.a.), I still think we should frame all accountnames with {{User-c|accountname}}. The added "(t c)" can be easily filtered during table export, but it makes it much easier to check for contributions, if we add it. Existing usage of the {{User|accountname}} template could be changed to {{User-c|accountname}} in a minute.

If we add multiple entries (account names, articles, sandboxes) to a table field, I suggest to use a semicolon (;) to separate the entries, not a comma (which might be used as part of an article or user name as well) or no separator at all (no separator makes it difficult to export the data using the HTML rendering, and we would have to parse the data on source code level instead). I don't know, if it is necessary, but if we find multiple multi-word entries where separating them by semicolon would prove to be difficult, we could put them in "quotes". Easy to parse and strip off in the resulting exported data.

"Course pages should have their tables replaced with links to the sections of WP:IEPS". Yes, but only after once more proofing and sync'ing the data into the master table.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:27, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Something like this:

{| class="wikitable sortable IEPtable"
|-
! ID
! Roll number
! Real name
! Account(s)
! Article(s)
! Sandbox(es)
! Mentor
! Approval/Sign
! Instructor
! Last change link
! Wikiproject review
! Online ambassador
! OA comments
! Cleanup comments
! Cleanup status
|-
| zzz <!-- Group ID, where applicable -->
| zzz <!-- Student roll number -->
| zzz <!-- Student real name -->
| {{User-c|zzz}} <!-- Student account name. No real name. Repeat with ; for more than one account name. -->
| [[zzz]] <!-- Article name without pipes. Repeat with ; for more than one article. -->
| [[User:zzz/sandbox]] <!-- Student sandbox. Repeat with ; for more than one sandbox. -->
| {{User-c|zzz}} <!-- Mentor account name or real name -->
| zzz <!-- Approval/sign -->
| {{User-c|zzz}} <!-- Instructor account name or real name -->
| [[zzz]] <!-- Link of last change made to article, where applicable -->
| zzz <!-- WikiProject Computing/Computer science review, where applicable -->
| {{User-c|zzz}} <!-- Online ambassador account name or real name -->
|
*yyyy-mm-dd: zzz <!-- OA comment. Repeat in new line for more than one comment. -->
|
*yyyy-mm-dd: zzz <!-- Cleanup comment. Repeat in new line for more than one comment. (add new comments on top) -->
|
*yyyy-mm-dd: zzz <!-- Reserved for cleanup status. Repeat in new line for more than one comment (add new statuses on top). -->
|}

for

ID	Roll number	Real name	Account(s)	Article(s)	Sandbox(es)	Mentor	Approval/Sign	Instructor	Last change link	Wikiproject review	Online ambassador	OA comments	Cleanup comments	Cleanup status
zzz	zzz	zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz	User:zzz/sandbox	zzz (t c)	zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz	zzz	zzz (t c)	yyyy-mm-dd: zzz	yyyy-mm-dd: zzz	yyyy-mm-dd: zzz

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 01:53, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I like it!!! No, we should not use the multi-row fields etc, that makes it confusing for scripts. For extracting data, the usernames/whatever need to be in a specific column number. Separation with semicolons (for multiple usernames/rollnos/articles/etc) is the best ("See above" is OK, too, except that then the comments and all become confusing). Let's not use the Template:User IEP thing. YOu're absolutely right, it will be useful next time, but right now, it will just be an unnecessary headache.

I think we should have the separate comments column, so that the originaly OA commetns dont get overwritten. The status column is an excellent idea. We can fill it with {{yes}}/{{no}}/{{partial}} templates, with the content being somewhat like "Checked:Copyvio/Blanked","Checked:Copyvio/Not Blanked","Checked:OK","Checking","Not sure", and "Unchecked" (or empty), along with the username and datestamp. Making new comments on another line is perfect for our needs.

There's no need to do the "User page has been tagged with an IEP template", as it will be done via a bot sooner or later (I'm waiting for the BRFA to get approved). The "All articles have been reverted/cleaned" etc will come into the "cleanup status" column.

Yep, we should use ISO, though a timestamp might also be necessary. Why not just use the ~~~~~ timestamper? There's no ambiguity in that (Example: 13:03, 7 November 2011 (UTC))... We probably won't need to machine read it, and even if we do, JS/Java/etc have libraries that can interpret all types of dates.

User-c is the way to go. It's pretty easy to filter out talk/contrib links, though its not so easy to do so for sandbox links (because some OAs encourage "playground" pages instead of sandboxes, etc.). Which is why they'll be fine sitting in a separate column.

By the way, there's this tool that makes editing wikitables easy. It's here. Unfotrunately, it doesn't work with the new toolbar. I'll try to modify it so that it does. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:03, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

We could use {{subst:ISO8601}} to implant the current date and time in ISO format, example: "2011-11-07T14:25Z ". (EDIT: Removed distracting extra linefeed and UTC link from template output. Hope nobody else needs it...) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:25, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, it makes it less human-readable that the ~~~~~, though it adds a bit of machine readability. I'd say we keep the ~~~~~, as the comments aren't going to be required in the machine-parsing. Actually, I don't see the point of timestamping the comments when the commenter's going to sign them anyways...

On a related note, I've started writing an editnotice to put on the page after we do the reformat. The working copy is here. Feel free to edit it.ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:39, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

The table proposed above has too many columns - it's much wider than the screen of my small laptop, and it's going to be much wider when populated. I'd suggest the following changes:

• ID - remove
• Roll number / Real name - remove one if not both
• Mentor - is it necessary ? abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)
• Approval/sign - remove
• Instructor - is it necessary ? abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)
• Last change link - needs clarification, what's the purpose of this ?
• Wikiproject review - need to clarify which wikiproject referring to
• Online ambassador - possibly abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)
• OA comments / Cleanup comments - combine ?
• Cleanup status - OK

If student edits are continuing then the cleanup status column should be sortable by date. DexDor (talk) 07:53, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm completely fine with it if we remove the extraneous columns, just that I didn't want to tamper with the info already there. It's of no use to us, but it is of use to the profs. Anyways, seeing that all edits are stopped till the cleanup is finished, I guess we can remove the columns (If anyone wants the data we can redirect them to an older revision). You make a good point about sorting the cleanup statuses. So we should use the ISO timestamp along with the signature in that cell (the same goes for the cleanup comments). The WikiProject review column will contain whatever is already there in the current table. We can combine the OA comments and cleanup comments, but it will become a headache to reformat the OA comments.

I have also added class="wikitable sortable IEPtable" to the table above (it won't interfere with anything, but it will ensure that other tables won't interfere when I extract data) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 10:09, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

IMHO, we cannot simply delete existing columns, if, at the same time, we remove the lists on the course sub pages (as I have already started in some cases after once more checking bit by bit, that this information is reflected in the master list as well). We do this to concentrate the data into once place so that we no longer need to sync with other places. Pointing the locals to an older version of the data in the page history is just the same as forking the data again.

"ID", "Roll number": Some of the courses actively use these group IDs. Removing this information may interfere with their work. "Real name": In some cases, this may help us to identify multiple accounts and it may also be used by the local people in Pune. "Mentor - is it necessary? abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)", "Approval/sign - remove", "Instructor - is it necessary? abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)", "Last change link - needs clarification, what's the purpose of this?", "Wikiproject review - need to clarify which wikiproject referring", "Online ambassador - possibly abbreviate to initials (with a key below table)": Surely, we don't need any of this, but this is information present in some of the course lists, and since we want them to actively use the online lists as their one-and-only data base (instead of using shadow lists in paper form or whatever, which would once again cause synchronisation problems), we cannot just delete their info, because we don't need it. I'm personally not a fan of footnotes at all, however, if this way we can bring the table width down enough, this would be a solution. "OA comments / Cleanup comments - combine?" Possible, I thought about this as well, but decided against it in my proposal because the OA comments sometimes have nothing to do with any cleanup efforts and even if they do, I thought it would be better to have an extra column for the more systematic and organized cleanup efforts which still have to take place. However, I'm not against it, if it really helps.

I'm open to removing columns we don't need, of course, but I think we would need approval from the course instructors and corresponding CAs for this first.

I don't use a wide screen myself and therefore cannot see the whole table as well, but I don't see much problem in scrolling or temporary reducing the browser font size ([CTRL]+[-]) if I need to have a broad view... --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:27, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Are there horizontally collapsible tables, so that those with narrow screens could untick the columns they don't want to see? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:35, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

No. Reducing the font size to 85% could help, though. —Ruud 11:47, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm not saying we delete their info. Remember, it will all be in the history.

How 'bout this? We put all the columns which are useless for our current purposes at the end. That way, whatever we need is up front, and the rest is off to the side. There isn't any way to make columns collapsible, unfortunately. (Though I can write a script that hides the last few columns if anyone's interested). It won't look too logical, but it serves our purposes. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:02, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Rearranging the order of columns and reducing the width of the table would give something like this:

Table. Test

ID	Roll number	Real name	Account(s)	Article(s)	Sandbox(es)	Cleanup status	Cleanup comments	OA comments	Online ambassador	Mentor	Instructor	Approval/ Sign	Last change link	Wikiproject review
zzz	zzz	zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz	User:zzz/sandbox	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz (t c)	zzz (t c)	zzz	zzz	zzz

The downside would be that we'd have to swap the order of entries for many tables (instead of just inserting stuff in between). This will make it more complicated (at least for me, as I don't have a good editor at hands right now), but if it helps the others, I would be okay with it.

Question: Adding "sortable" to the wikitable class, the table will again be blown up to full width. Any workaround? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:55, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I think we can remove the Instructor column altogether as it never changes within a course and the instructur is defined in the course tables as well, so no information gets lost here.

I'm not sure about the role of the Mentors, but perhaps we can combine this column with the OAs. If this would be important, we could add prefixes such as MT:{{User-c|accountname}} or OA:{{User-c|accountname}} and still save a column. Since the "link of last change" and "Approval/Sign" columns are never used at the same time, perhaps we can combine them as well. And finally, if we combine the "Wikiproject" and the "OA comments" columns (which have been mixed up anyway in many tables) we get another column. Gives:

Table. Test

ID	Roll number	Real name	Account(s)	Article(s)	Sandbox(es)	Cleanup status	Cleanup comments	OA comments / Wikiproject review	Online ambassador / Mentor	Approval / Sign / Last change link
zzz	zzz	zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz	User:zzz/sandbox	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	OA:zzz (t c); MT:zzz (t c)	zzz; zzz

Alternative proposal with a column order more in line with the existing table layout (and therefore easier to convert semi-manually):

Table. Test

ID	Roll number	Real name	Account(s)	Article(s)	Sandbox(es)	Approval / Sign / Last change link	Online ambassador / Mentor	OA comments / Wikiproject review	Cleanup comments	Cleanup status
zzz	zzz	zzz	zzz (t c)	zzz	User:zzz/sandbox	zzz; zzz	OA:zzz (t c); MT:zzz (t c)	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz	2011-11-08T16:55Z: zzz

Would the second proposal be narrow enough to fit on the screens? It doesn't for me, but neither do the existing course tables, but I don't care. If we could get width:50% to work with sortable tables, we won't have any problems at all... --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:28, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

For test purposes, I have changed the first of the course tables in the master list to this proposed format. It's still wide, but at least not wider than some of the existing tables. (I found it very time-consuming to change the order of columns, that's why I used the second of the proposals. Swapping the column order is an extra step anyway, so we don't waste time if we'd do it in two passes, would it still be necessary to change the order at a later stage. Regarding width:70% not working with sortable tables, is this a bug in the implementation or is this "by design"? Should we remove the "sortable" to make width work so that all can see the whole table without scrolling, and re-add it at a later stage, when it becomes more useful? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 04:21, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

In regard to those changes - I've been trying to finish off that course, and the table format has been changing, so I've moved to another course instead. However, now I'm lost as to what I'm supposed to do with the new format. I was never an OA, as far as I am aware - just someone assigned to do CCI. It may be that I am an OA, but now my comments are listed as OA comments, and there are two new fields regarding data I've already added, but which are blank. Do I fill in those fields with the same data I was adding to the OA field? Or is a third person, other than me, to check those cleanup fields? And does this mean that they will be repeating work I've completed? Or perhaps I shouldn't be adding data to the comments field at all, only to the cleanup fields? And, of course, if that's the case, what data is to go in the "cleanup status" column? At this stage I'm going on the assumption that I can't work with that course, as I might be compounding problems with the new formats. - Bilby (talk) 05:04, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

@Matthiaspaul: There's no need to make the table fit in the window (So keep it sortable and remove the 70% width). Only the important stuff should fit right now, and the remaining columns (name/rollno/group no) should be shunted to the end. There's no need to test out the format on WP:IEPS right now (copy the first table into your sandbox and try it out if you want). I'm working out the bugs from the wiki table editor, and this will let you shift columns in a jiffy.

@Bilby: Continue your cleanup efforts on that page. You may use the OA comments section for now, right now we are only testing formats... ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 05:27, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay. I was not so much "testing", but more trying to seek consensus while moving forward at the same time. ;-) If WTE allows to swap columns at a later time, I think, I will continue in the current order and you swap the columns afterwards. I am temporary without my favourite editors (TSE Pro, Ultraedit), that's why I am a bit "handicaped" when it comes to REGEX and scriptable tasks such as table reordering, and doing this manually is a time-sink. That's why I prefer to keep the columns in basically the same order as they are already, and someone else can change it with proper tools at hands. BTW. I think it would be a good idea to leave at least the ID column as the first one (using the existing group IDs where present, and just counting up elsewhere). It doesn't take much room, but serves as a memorizable index into a row and makes it easy to restore the original list order.

Putting the column order aside for a moment, do we have consensus on the type and combination of columns in general? Should we combine some more? (I like your idea with the yes/no/partial template for the cleanup status, but this is something that can be added later, or should we set it to No now?) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:36, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I finally got the table editor to work. It's still quite buggy, but it does the trick.

To install, type this code in your skin js page.

importScript('User:Manishearth/WikiTable.js')

Once you install, two new table icons should appear in the editing toolbar. Select part of a table, and click the first icon. It should let you do all sorts of stuff with tables, most importantly adding and moving columns. The save button updates the table in the editbox (it does NOT save the page) Note that the script is still quite buggy (Because it was probably meant for simple wikitables, without templates etc.). It has the following bugs:

• Sometimes the full wikitext of a row gets crammed into a single cell (Just scroll down the table while the Table Editor is open and check for anomalies) These anomalies have to be fixed by hand, unfortunately.
• Templates with a pipe character mess up the editor. Basically, "OA:{{User-c|Manishearth}}" will show up as "Manishearth}}". It does not affect the actual wikitext of the cell, it ownly looks like it does. You may move around such half-eaten columns normally, the eaten text will move around with them (Even though it won't appear to do so).
• Also, the editor can't work with the header row (actually it does, but this setting breaks the rest of the script). Header rows can't be seen in the editor (They aren't removed, though, they just don't show up). Moving columns around does not affect the header row. For this reason, I suggest you convert the header row to a normal row (convert the !s to |s, etc), use the table editor to shift things around, press save, and then convert the top row back to a header row. I'm going to try and fix this bug.

ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 11:52, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

In reply to the stuff you wrote above, I'd say that the yes/no/partial templates should only be used once an article has been/is being checked. If an article hasn't been glanced at, then we just leave the cell blank. Instructions on formatting will be in the editnotice (or in comments in the cells), which will let them know that they have to use the yesno template. As for agreement on the columns, I'm fine with them , but of course you need input from others. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 11:57, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Alrighty. I've not fixed the header row bug per se, but I found a good enough workaround. All you have to do is make sure that the header row has a "|-" before it. Eg:

Instead of:
{|style=blah etc etc
|+ Caption
!ID
!abc
!def
|-
(data goes here)
|}
Do:
{|style=blah etc etc
|+ Caption
|-
!ID
!abc
!def
|-
(data goes here)
|}

Hope that helps! ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:09, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

By the way, the merging of columns required by your later proposals won't be possible via the editor. Let's just go with the original format and shunt all columns irrelevant to cleanup off to the side. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:12, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Multiple inheritance

Since I added a {{copyvio}} to Multiple inheritance some days ago, an editor has very politely asked me to "unblock" the article because they need it to complete an assignment. The problems with that article are possibly not only due to the IEP - I suspect it was in bad shape beforehand - but I am quite reluctant to remove the copyvio tag. I still have serious doubts about it. I have no objections if someone else would do so, as long as the sourcing is improved. -84user (talk) 12:05, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Currently, all IEP student edits are supposed to be stopped. See WT:IEP#Relief. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:44, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Apparently this student's deadline is the 10th. There's a temporary workspace available at Talk:Multiple inheritance/Temp which can be used as the foundation of a copyvio free article if the student competently rewrites the content in his own words. This is mentioned in the copyvio template. MER-C 13:00, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I think that they aren't allowed to even edit sandboxes (and the temporary workspace should fall underneath that category). See the Relief section above. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:15, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, IEP students from CoEP have been asked not to edit on wikipedia (main space or sandbox) anymore. If any student from CoEP edits, he/she will show up on this list: http://toolserver.org/~fschulenburg/student-o-meter.php and the Campus Ambassadors will get in touch with them and ask them personally not to edit for the time being. Im keeping a close watch on this list and as you can see no student from CoEP has edited in the past 24 hours. Nitika.t (talk) 09:10, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Nitika, you seem to trust the database way more than we do... I mean, as discussed here on this page, we are still in the process to put together a complete, accurate and up-to-date master database (Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Students) from the snippets of incomplete, outdated and faulty info distributed all over the place. In the past days, several students and articles missing have been added to this list, and if you check the students' list of contributions, the list of articles actually edited is still much larger than currently reflected in the master list. We are doing this because we cannot start cleaning up systematically without the data. If you already have more complete data then please, by all means, provide it (merge it into the master table, not any other place), because any serious investigation and cleanup effort must fail if the underlaying data is incomplete.

I just had a quick look at the student-o-meter (displaying events back to 1:40, 7 November 2011 right now). It missed for example RAJATPASARI (t c), one of the editors of "Multiple inheritance", who has edited WP on 2011-11-07T08:11:42 (although harmless, please don't penalize him for that).

Also, there is still significant IP activity (which can be traced back to Pune) in various IEP articles. Obviously some students continue to edit articles as IPs now that they have been disallowed to edit under their normal accounts. Does the student-o-meter also trigger on IP addresses?

(On a different note, I'm not sure it was really a good idea to disallow any edits under their student accounts. They should at least have been allowed to continue to edit on talk pages without being penalized, because now they cannot even answer questions raised by the community without risking being penalized. One more thing that IMHO should better have been discussed with the community first.) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:15, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Curiously some of those copyvios date back to 2007. I've reverted back to pre IEP material and repaced to 2007 copyvio material with an earlier description. See page talk page for details.--Salix (talk): 09:29, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Signpost report

Hello all. I am currently writing a report on the Signpost for publication in eight hours' time, and would welcome any comments and statements from interested parties. The working draft of the story is here; please email if you would like to contribute. Thanks in advance, Skomorokh 14:15, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that though Hisham was right about the cultural differences having no impact, (in my opinion) he was wrong about the attitudes not having any bearing on this. I have studied in both countries, so I have observed firsthand the stark differences in the attitudes towards plagiarism. In the US, plagiarism is denounced at an early stage (3rd grade or so), and teachers do penalize offending students. I've even seen teachers paste random chunks of a report in Google do check for plagiarism. On the other hand, in India, I haven't heard a single word about plagiarism yet. Teachers don't bat an eyelid even when the majority of the class submits almost the same content (copied from enwp or the first Google result). Bibliographies usually have "google.com" in them (Which we all know is meaningless), and usually no other entries (Sometimes you see en.wikipedia.org also). When I first came here and saw this happening, I asked a few students why they plagiarised, and didn't they know that it was illegal? They were genuinely mystified by this.

So I feel that the difference of attitudes has a very big part to play in this whole mess, though we can't blame anyone as such differences aren't obvious unless you have experienced both sides of the coin.

Note: All of the above are my observations and in no way do I mean to generalize for the country as a whole. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:03, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I've observed the same thing here in the US; in my area, we have a fairly large Indian, Thai, and Chinese population. None of the aforementioned groups, when they first come over here, have any concept of copyright (although in the case of the Chinese, it's more of a willful, malicious disregard for it; my uncle married a Chinese woman who taught English in China, and she can attest to the problems there). Again, it's anecdotal, but my experience has more or less been the same. Not that it necessarily stops plagiarism from American kids (especially at community colleges, where I tutor now), but it's definitely not so endemic. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:37, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

As a teacher and teacher trainer, I have been observing exactly the same phenomena here in Asia for the past 13 years. In universities, plagiarism is often tolerated from the dean down - graduate schools are no exception. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:24, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Common format: We need consensus

To be able to proceed in updating WP:IEPS to a common format (for machine parsing etc), we need consensus on the format. The current proposal is these columns (Not in this order):ID,Roll number,Real name,Account(s),Article(s),Sandbox(es),Mentor,Approval/Sign,Last change link,Wikiproject review,Online ambassador,OA comments,Cleanup comments,Cleanup status.
The columns irrelevant to the cleanup should be shunted to the end of the table (It's better not to remove them as the columns have some significance to the profs/CAs/etc). For a discussion on what the columns do, please see WT:IEP#Common_format.
A proposed editnotice is under construction at User:Manishearth/Ambassador/IEPnotice. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:28, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi everyone, I see that there has been a discussion about going through CCI procedures to clean up the articles from the Pune pilot. At the same time, as most of you are probably aware, staff members have already asked various Online Ambassadors - both some India-based ones and some U.S.-based ones - to take on cleaning up these articles (you can see which articles have been assigned to be cleaned by which Ambassadors on this list of students). While not all the Ambassadors have started cleaning up the articles they've been assigned to, many have, and I believe that the cleanup work they've already done have been very valuable in removing poor content from the articles. Yesterday I contacted almost all Ambassadors involved in the cleanup effort to inquire whether they're still available to help if they haven't already started doing cleanup, and whether some of them can take on cleaning up more articles if they've already done some cleanup. For the purposes of cleanup, I would also like to replace the Ambassadors who have little Wikipedia-editing experience with Ambassadors with more editing experience.

Seeing that both a CCI discussion and an Ambassador deployment effort are going on at the same time for the purposes of cleaning up articles, I want to work with you all on coordination to make sure no one is doing repeat work. As I mentioned, some Ambassadors have already put in a lot of time and effort in removing poor content from articles, and I wouldn't want any other community member to have to duplicate this work. The whole reason we assigned Ambassadors to the cleanup effort is to take workload off the larger community's shoulder - the community has had to shoulder too much workload related to the Pune pilot already (I fully acknowledge that and thank you all sincerely for the work you've done), so I would like the cleanup work to be largely shouldered by our Ambassadors rather than by the larger Wikipedia community, to save the community at large this burden. Of course, I think that a cleanup force made up of both Ambassadors and the community at large might be best, since a lot of cleanup work still remain to be done and our Ambassador resources are limited. What I really want to avoid, though, is getting any of us into a situation where we're just duplicating the work that someone else has already done.

So here's my proposal, and I'd like to get everyone's feedback so that we can move forward quickly depending on what we decide together. I say that we use this list of students as the master list that we'll all work off of, and we'll assign all the student articles on that page either to Ambassadors or to community members at large. Whoever is assigned to a student article would be listed in a column next to the article. Many of the student articles on that page have already been assigned to people (in fact many have already been cleaned up by Ambassadors), so we don't have to worry about those. But some articles haven't yet been assigned, and some are currently assigned to people with little Wikipedia-editing experience, so I'd recommend that we divide up these articles among the (experienced) Ambassadors and at-large community members willing to be part of this cleanup effort. This way, someone is "responsible" for cleaning up each article, and it'll be clear who is responsible for which article. Of course, I realize that the list may not be totally complete yet, and may lack some information that is important to the cleanup effort. So what I would recommend there is for us all to work together to update the list to make it more complete, and also change the format of the list (in alignment with some of the earlier discussions on this talk page) to make it more usable. I'd advise against creating completely separate lists/pages because that could lead to confusion and duplicate work.

What does everyone think about this? My basic point here is that I think everyone interested in the cleanup effort - staff, Ambassadors, super nice Wikipedia community members at large - needs to work together and stay in constant communication with each other during the cleanup process; to not do so would be to risk wasting people's time doing repeat work (staff is certainly guilty of this as well, but I want to change that and make the Pune-pilot cleanup effort going forward truly collaborative). Thanks all. Annie Lin (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 18:31, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

My experience is that most Ambassadors - even if experienced Wikipedians - are not always knowledgeable about the subject matter of the article they are supposed to review. So I'd really like to see this work being done in duplo. Once by an Ambassador, who can take care of trivial matters like copyright violations, once by a editor who knowledgeable about the subject and can also take care of any quality issues (i.e. assessing whether the article only needs a small amount of copy editing, or is better off being reverted to its pre-IEP state.) Clearly the latter class of editors are in much shorter supply and less willing to be named as "responsible" for a particular set of articles. —Ruud 19:08, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

• The IEP CCI hasn't gone live yet. The processes, as far as I can see are complementary to a certain extent. The full CCI which will generate very easy links to all contributions which will have to be checked. They'll look like this for each of the 800 IEP students. In my view, a final check will still have to be done via the CCI after the dust completely settles regardless of what the Online Ambassadors do. There are several reasons for this:

1. Students are still editing, even today (see below), even in courses where they have been explicitly told not to.
2. Students are still adding their user names
3. Students have gone back and edited after the original copyvio was cleared out and comments made in the status columns. Some of those comments are quite old and/or undated.
4. Some of the OA/volunteer editor checks are only being made to the listed articles in the tables, which in many cases are inaccurately listed and don't represent all the places the student have actually edited.

When the CCI finally gets underway (and no one has started there to my knowledge), the work the OA's have done and are doing will have still have been a huge help. The CCI cleaner-uppers will be able to see from the article's history and cross checking with Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students whether it has already been checked, by whom, and when. They'll see if any copyvio has been removed, whether or not the students have edited it since then, and if the the original checker was sufficiently experienced to trust their check. If all the conditions are met, the article can be quickly signed off. If not, then it will need a re-check. It's the only way to do it systematically and thoroughly. At this point there's no use in rushing. It took 3 months to add the copyvio and it may well take another 3 months to get rid of it. But that's OK. Better to do it properly. Those are my thoughts, anyhow. Hopefully MER-C and Moonriddengirl can give us some expert input on this. Voceditenore (talk) 19:56, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I fully agree with what Ruud and Voceditenore have said already. Any copyvio the OAs and the community can remove now will not be wasted time, but make the more formal and fully recursive CCI approach much easier. And the lesser the time copyvios remain in the articles the better, not only for legal reasons, but also because any other edit on top of copyvio'ed content is at risk to have to be deleted as well - this would be a waste of the precious contributors' energy. Still, I see, that a systematic CCI is necessary later on to ensure that we really catch all edits. The master list is still in flux, as are the edits, and even with the help of the student-o-meter and huge watchlists (based on days-old data, though) we will miss at least some activity, and we haven't even started to add all the other articles/sandboxes, which have been edited by the students (and I guess we will see even more once we come around to add IP addresses to the lists as well). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:32, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I may write more later, but just quickly - as far as I am aware, a CCI has been ongoing for close to two weeks. The US Online Ambassadors who were willing to help were asked to conduct a CCI, and speaking for myself that's the way I've approached this. Given that there are a large number of students, but few contributions for each student, checking all of their edits where I have been assigned a student has not be difficult, and I assume that this is the same process that the other "EOAs" have been doing. I'm a bit concerned that there is a lot of duplication of work planned, which is less than ideal. My impression has been that there was a process in place to handle the copyright concerns, but there has been a parallel process being developed here as well, when I'm not yet sure that the parallel process was necessary. - Bilby (talk) 21:07, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

At the risk of reiterating myself - but I'm not sure if I was entirely clear in my first reply - but we seem to have at least two problems with the IEP. A copyvio problem and a quality problem. Anything the Ambassdors can do to remedy those quickly is fine, but I think both require the articles to be reviewed more carefully than the Ambassadors can do on their own. —Ruud 21:13, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

@Bilby. This is the CCI. It's an offical process. Is that what you've been asked to participate in? It appears that what you've been asked to do is centered on the Student Lists. I'm not sure how clear the WMF is about what an official CCI actually is and may have confused it in their emails with simply "cleaning up copyvio". The CCI isn't due to go live for a while. So any help you give on the Student List page won't be duplicated (per my comments above), unless the students edit their articles after you've checked them. Voceditenore (talk) 22:01, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I've been involved in quite a few CCIs in the past, and the requst from the Annie Lin was specifically "look through those students' edits and remove all copyright violations or bad edits in general". There was a lot more detail, but we were being asked to remove copyvio, copyedit if possible, and remove badly written material to the talk page in regard to all of the student's edits on any articles - pretty much the same expections of a normal CCI, with the addition of the quality requirements. My concern is simply duplication: I get the impression that there is currently a process in place which is doing the job that the CCI is intended to do. But while the people asked over from the OA program have been following that process, a parallel and effectivly identical process has also been built. The result is going to be a lot of people doing the same jobs: where copyvio or problems were detected by the OA, it won't be a major issue for someone else to look, see it is fixed, and move on; but where none was detected the second person will have to go through the same process of confirming that it isn't a problem. I suspect, if nothing else, some of that duplication can be reduced if the OA people are asked to replicate what they've done on the CCI process, but doing so will slow things down.

The bit which confuses me is that, in reading the above, it seems that it has been stated that there is a formal process that seems to be being used to fix the problem, but that nevertheless a second formal process has also been developed. - Bilby (talk) 22:56, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I didn't set up the CCI. but my impression is that it will serve as a final mopping up and check, after the whole thing has well and truly finished, not a duplication of what the OAs are currently doing. I would have thought that CCI investigators will cross check with the comments on the student lists. If the OA says they've checked for copyvio and haven't found any and the student hasn't edited the article since their last check, then the article(s) would be signed off without further checks. Voceditenore (talk) 23:06, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea to me. I have absolute confidence, for instance, in Bilby's work in this area. :) Many of the OAs working on this are familiar to me. I don't know that much about bots and what they can do, but I know for instance that MER-C does. :D Would it be possible for us to cross-check the CCI against the OA cleanup chart? If not, I can do that by hand, since there's not a whiff of content management there. It's clerical stuff, and I stand ready to serve. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:22, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

I echo this comment made by Voceditenore. The CCI is absolutely necessary because the OA cleanup shares the same gross organizational incompetence (not the OAs' fault) as the whole project. The WMF did not even attempt to coordinate before throwing the OAs at the student list despite the CCI being brought up in the office hours. The CCI may also serve other purposes when the need arises. MER-C 09:01, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Bilby, what we are preparing here right now is a solid database on which cleanup work of any kind can be based. Unfortunately, little thought has been put into the data aggregation and representation by those who ran the programme, perhaps because nobody could predict the lack of discipline of the students even to add their valid account and other data to the online course lists, or the lack of interest of the local people to verify, enforce and correct the online data earlier on in the timeline, or it simply was not seen that an accurate database would become important for any maintenance or controlling tasks alongside the IEP, I don't know and will leave that to a post-mortem-analysis. However, the organization of the data was (and still is) fundamentally flawed and that's how we ended up with dozens of half-maintained lists with similar but not identical contents, which need to be carefully merged and synchronized again. Our current efforts don't focus on correcting the structural mistakes already done, because it would require more work. Our focus now is on the cleanup, not the development of a proper technical infrastructure to base future programmes on - nevertheless, some of the stuff reshaped now may also be a good starting point in the future.

Anyway, even in the past few days we still stumbled upon several participating students and lots of articles not listed previously. We found them by reverse lookup from article space to user space and recursive backtracing of "suspicious" edits in the page history of articles, talk, and user pages. So, any cleanup efforts so far would have missed them. That's why we'll need the CCI, which will systematically and fully recursively scan and (re-)check any of the articles touched by any of the students. If they are found to be carefully cleaned up already, no further work is required. If not, the CCI will have to deal with the left-overs of any prior cleanup efforts. So, (almost) no work will be doubled, and if the WMF now wants the OAs to clean up before the formal CCI will come around, this is perfectly fine as well, for as long as it is documented what has been done. It does not interfere if we work on the same online data base (the master list). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:14, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I may be giving the wrong impression. I'm not against a CCI - I want this cleaned up too - but I'd like to avoid duplicating effort, mostly because I know of the backlog that is at CCI (through lack of volunteers, more than anything - CCI work is labour intensive, difficult and unrewarding, but essential, hence my immense respect for people like MER-C and Moonriddengirl, along with all involved). So if there's way of combining efforts it would work out better. The benefit I see from the current Emergency OA model is that it is proactively seeking people to work on the problem, which is a good move in my eyes from those involved in the IEP. Capitalising on that would be both a way of combining efforts and, when this occurs in the future, having the beginnings of a possible response model. (I say that simply because, as an educator who works with hundreds of tertiary students a year, I know the likelihood of copyright problems in any program in any country, even though I happily accept that the rewards outweigh risks). At any rate, that sounds like the plan, so all is good. - Bilby (talk) 12:47, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

@Bilby: The CCI won't be a duplication of effort. Our cleanup will involve checking the IEP edits to a particular page, determining if it is a copyvio (and fixing bad grammar), notifying the student, and recording our actions in the master table. The CCI will look at the resultant article (after our cleanup), do a check for remaining copyvios, and they will also check our actions (Which are recorded with diffs, so it will be quite quick). This level of redundancy (We'd probably go for more redundancy if we weren't short of volunteers) is required to make sure that every single copyvio is removed. The reason that we aren't just doing a CCI (which is rigorous enough to not need any more redundancy), is that (like you mentioned), CCI has a lack of volunteers (And will thus take a very long time to go through ~1000 articles). We need to get rid of these copyvios ASAP (Remember, they're live.. We can't have that at all..). The best thing to do is attempt to clean it up as much as possible in a short time so that the copyvios are no longer live, and the CCI has a much easier job to do. The CCI will basically 'clean up the cleanup', by picking up any stray stuff we've missed (or wrongly blanked).

@Voceditnore: Not all of the OAs are experienced enough for the community to be sure that "if an OA says it's OK, it's OK" (At least, that's what it looks like from older discussions on this page). The CCI investigators are experienced in the field of identifying and addressing copyvios, so it would be better if they checked the OA or other cleanup volunteer actions also. We should provide diffs of all cleanup edits in the master list (comments section) to make life easy for the CCI.
@Moonriddengirl: It shouldn't be too hard to cross-check. In fact, MER-C has written a bot that imports a list of students/articles and generates a CCI. Unfortunately, we don't have a complete list of students/articles yet. Aside from that, it's not machine readable (Because of the various formats). Once that is done, MER-C can bot-create the CCI, and since the CCI will be bot-created, it, too will have a regular format which can be broken down for comparison with the OA cleanup (I doubt we will have to do this, though, if the CCI is started after the OA cleanup is finished). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:25, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, Voceditnore, this isn't exactly the CCI. It's just a page for testing MER-Cs CCI creator. (See WT:IEP#Contributor_surveyor_finished) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:28, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes I know not all of the OAs are experienced enough for the community to be sure that "if an OA says it's OK, it's OK". I think I mentioned even further up that we needed to cross-check how experienced the OA cleaners were, and re-check their work if in doubt. This was especially true of almost all of the "out of process" OAs appointed by the IEP which I had pointed out at Meta a week ago. (I believe the bulk of them were finally removed yesterday.) But even some of the ones from the "normal" US OA program are inexperienced with doing this work, and frankly, the work itself is so mind-numbing that it's almost impossible not to "glaze over" after a while. Voceditenore (talk) 16:13, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

@ManishEarth: I'm getting two stories here, which is confusing. However, redundancy is good, but I don't see it as a plus here: a CCI is going to have a hard time going through all of the relevant articles, and the work involved to recheck something already checked is going to be considerable. Redundancy is great when you can afford it, but if you can't afford to loose time doing things twice, it is normally better to work out a means of focusing on the relevant problems so that duplication is removed. Especially with some big CCIs floating around that will also need to be addressed elsewhere. - Bilby (talk) 21:15, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Let me make an attempt at summarizing the points made by various people so far on this topic: the CCI process is going to be a separate cleanup process than the Online Ambassador (OA) efforts. The OA efforts have already been underway and are continuing to operate, and are focused on not only removing copyright violations, but also removing unsourced content, very bad English grammar, and other hard-to-fix poor content in general (these are the instructions that the OAs participating in the cleanup have received). The CCI process has not yet started and it is uncertain when exactly it will start; when it does start, it will involve community members with CCI experience in general, and it will focus mostly on getting rid of copyright violations. User:Bilby is expressing concern that the CCI process will duplicate a lot of the work that the OA efforts already did; a few other people on this page are saying that the duplication will be minimal, and others are saying that the duplication might be necessary for adequately removing poor content coming out of the Pune pilot. There appears to be consensus on the point that even though the CCI process will take place sometime down the line, the current OA efforts are still needed and valuable because the copyvios and poor content need to be removed as much as possible immediately.

Is this an accurate summary? Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Building off of this, I have a few points and questions:

• I want to echo User:Matthiaspaul's point above that it is crucial for everyone involved in cleanup - whether via the CCI process or the OA efforts - to be working off of the same database, namely this master list of students. This will minimize the amount of duplicate work, because OAs are using that student list and leaving comments there after they've cleaned up articles. I understand that the master student list might still be incomplete - some professors in the Pune pilot have still not yet provided their students' usernames and article information, so more information continues to be added to that list. Furthermore, the list could perhaps use some format improvements (like additional columns or beautification in general). It is therefore important that all of us continue to update and improve the student list, but we should all work off this same list instead of creating any separate databases/lists for the duration of this OA and CCI cleanup.
• I'd like to call on the community at large to join the OA efforts. The OA efforts - despite its (informal) name - are not restricted to OAs (and our OA resources are limited anyway!). I basically see the "OA efforts" as the currently ongoing efforts to remove poor content from the Pune pilot student articles before the CCI process does a second cleanup later on. So if any community member has some time to help out with cleanup this week or next week, I would really, really appreciate it if you could go to the master student list (linked above), put your username in the "Online Ambassador" column next to some student articles that currently have "IN NEED" next to it, and help clean up those articles (remove copyvios, unsourced content, bad grammar, poor content in general). We can use all the help we can get right now!
• I understand that some folks are concerned about how much the OAs can be trusted with doing cleanup. Following some discussions on this topic on the relevant Meta talk page, I've removed almost all OAs who have little prior Wikipedia-editing experience from the cleanup effort. But there still seems to be concerns about how much to trust the OAs. I would really like for all of us to come together behind the OAs and support their cleanup work rather than cast doubt on it. Like what many at-large community members have (very generously) been doing, the OAs have already been doing highly valuable work in cleaning up those student articles, and I believe all these people deserve applause rather than suspicion for that work. I think it is unhealthy to cast doubt on people who are completely good-faithed members of the cleanup efforts - it is unhealthy not only because I think we should build our relationships on trust (and "assume good faith") rather than mutual skepticism, but also because to say that "we can't trust the OAs and therefore in the CCI we'll need to re-check everything the OAs did" would just lead to a lot of unnecessary duplicate work. So my suggestion is for us all to get behind the OAs (and to get behind the CCI folks when they start the CCI process down the line), and for everyone in the cleanup effort - OAs, CCI people, etc. - to operate on mutual trust. Now, if there are particular OAs who you think should not be part of the cleanup effort because you think those OAs for some reason don't have the right qualifications, I encourage you to please indicate (soon) who you think those OAs are who should be removed from the cleanup effort (please also provide good reasons for why you'd like to see those particular OAs taken off the cleanup effort), and then we can talk about it and take off those OAs who actually do not meet the "right qualifications" for doing cleanup. I certainly think that possibly some OAs aren't experienced enough with copyright issues on Wikipedia to help with cleanup, and in that case we probably should take them off this effort. But for all OAs who remain in the cleanup effort, I'd highly recommend that we assume good faith and assume competency, just as we'd do the same for other Wikipedia community members at-large. Annie Lin (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 23:31, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

• Annie, this has nothing to do with not assuming good faith, and I would appreciate it if you didn't put it those terms. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the editors' "trustworthiness" as people and no one has implied that. It has to do with the level of experience in a very specific task. Any conscientious editor would welcome a back-up check when they're operating in a wholly new area. I know I would.

Two days ago I left some tips for a very experienced editor and Online Ambassador for the US program (13,000 edits, 43 articles created) after seeing his message on another editor's talk page:

"I have no previous experience with systematically looking for copyright violations. I am wondering if you could give me a few tips about how I could be helpful in cleaning up the messes."

I'm sure he'll do fine now, but I'm wondering if the email messages sent to the OAs gave them tips and advice on how to do an effective copyvio search? If not, it might help to send one around rather than waiting for them to ask. There may be others in a similar position which is why they've been slow to get started.

On another note, if you're looking for more help in the current process you've set up, I suggest you reach out to the subject-specialised WikiProjects. If you leave a note on the project talk pages, you may be able to recruit not only experienced editors, but ones with specialist knowledge of the subject area and access to offline sources. Specialist knowledge is a big help in "fixing" articles. I've cleaned quite a few from the CoEP, but on several occasions the English was so garbled and my subject area knowledge so poor, that I had no idea what the students were trying to say. Thus, I couldn't adequately repair the article apart from removing any traced copyvio. I suggest you reach out to the following if you haven't already done so:

WikiProject Business • WikiProject Economics • WikiProject Engineering • WikiProject Technology • WikiProject Computer science • WikiProject Computing

Having said that, make sure these editors have a place to make their comments. The following either have no table at all, or tables without places for the OA/reviewer's name and comments: History of Economic Thought Year 2 Group A (section), Agribusiness and Marketing Year 2 Group A (section), History of Economic Thought Year 2 Group B (section), Agribusiness and Marketing Year 2 Group B (section), Research Methodology Year 3 Group B (section).

Best, Voceditenore (talk) 10:05, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I feel the same way as Voceditnore.. It's not a question of 'trustworthiness', it's a question of 'experience'. It's perfectly fine if the OAs do the cleanup (along with the rest of the community), but a CCI would be necessary as a final, reassuring check.

We should also start to update the tables to the format given above. (I'll do some now if I get the time) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:34, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I've updated the first table on the list to the new format (More cleanup-centric). Please use the same column order when updating others. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 14:02, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

I've done a few more. Please revert if you feel that we need to rethink the new format. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 14:29, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Great! The course sub-pages of the Symbiosis School of Economics and the SNDT Womens University have now all been merged into the master list. I have gone through the change log of the corresponding sub-pages back to 2011-11-02 (and in one case back to September) to check for user name and articles changes. The tables on the sub-pages have been deleted afterwards in order to force students to use the master list. So, we'll now have to continue with the more difficult task of converting the COEP tables into the new format as well... I would like to discuss one possible change to the current table order, though. The current order is:

Account(s)

Article(s)

Sandbox(es)

Cleanup comments

Cleanup status

OA comments / Wikiproject review

Online ambassador / Mentor / Campus ambassador

CA comments

ID

Roll number

Real name

Approval / Sign / Last change

And my proposed change would be:

ID

Account(s)

Article(s)

Sandbox(es)

Cleanup status

Cleanup comments

OA comments / Wikiproject review

CA Comments

Online ambassador / Mentor / Campus ambassador

Roll number

Real name

Approval / Sign / Last change

That is, the ID would be in the first column to help identify a particular row. Optionally, the three comments columns would be grouped together, with the cleanup columns coming first so that still fit on the screen. The SNDT Womens University table is currently in this order. What do you think? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:56, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Good work with the course page cleanup. We should modify the links on the master lists to go from "Courses/Fall 2011/Course#Students" to just "Courses/Fall 2011/Course" (Otherwise we get recursive links). But we can do this after the reformat is over.

@ID column: Hmm, the ID column takes up space, and we don't need it to identify a student. To identify a student, a username us sufficent (with a course name for the students in two courses). The ID column will not be actively used and glanced at. The username/articlename should be visible for quick clicking, and the comments also take precedence.
@CA Comments I'm rather indifferent about that column (doesn't really matter where it goes), because its empty in almost all the tables. So I'd rather keep it the way it is and spend time in reformatting the newer tables (The ones from COEP are giving a bit of trouble as they have missing cells, etc, which trips up the script and half the time I'm adding workarounds to it). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 09:51, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps it's a language thing as I don't speak any Indian language, but I find it quite difficult to remember many of the students' account names, so between browsing the rendered page and editing a particular entry, I often use the ID (if available) as a handle to find the corresponding location more easily. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:34, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... It's then much easier to just look for the article name (or a snippet of it). Or just scroll to the side and see the IDs there. But OK, I'll shift the ID column once I'm done with the rest. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 11:19, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Students are editing

A large number of editors from the Data Structures course are editing again, in article space no less [13]. Why? According to the course page there is some kind of deadline November 10th. —Ruud 18:27, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

But the course page also gives an article edit deadline of the 2011-10-25. Really strange. (We also discussed this further up under #Multiple inheritance.) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:59, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

The professor in charge of this class is a prior (and existing) wikipedia editor. He's determined that he wants to carry on the project. He's had previously given an extended timeline to his students of November 10 (even prior to our asking all the faculty members to stop the assignment.) He's extended it to November 12 now. He's also told them that anyone doing any kind of copyvio (text or image) will be lose all 20 marks for the assignment. He has also told his students that anyone who's work ha been redirected to wikibooks should continue on wikibooks. Lastly, he's told his students that anyone who have page redirects or other such issues can submit assignments to him outside of wiki. We had spoken to the Director and all the professors (including the one for this class.) We will speak to him again tomorrow morning India time and reiterate the reasons for the suspension of the project and the seriousness of the issues around copyvio and other quality concerns. Hisham (talk) 20:21, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Half a dozen students from Macroeconomics are still editing today, 11 Nov, with at least one still adding copyvio material in the mainspace. Their course page says their deadline is 14 Nov. JohnCD (talk) 22:32, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Sarangvk (talk · contribs) is still editing heavily. I haven't had a change to check for copyvios but given the proficiency of the English being used compared to the user's the previous text, it needs to be checked. I'll be very busy today and tomorrow and probably won't have time to check but since I thought students weren't supposed to be editing at this point and this student has added mass amounts of content, I thought I should bring it up somewhere. OlYeller21^Talktome 15:38, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

At least one article, AK model, is mostly lifted from here as is the caption of an uploaded image, File:Ak model.png. I tagged the article and will check other contributions. Jojalozzo 21:59, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

The edits are continuing: [14] Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Interest-free economy, [15]... MER-C 03:41, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

USEP discussion

There's a discussion going on here about the US education programme. It has not had the same problems as the IEP, but it does impact the general community of editors. Those involved here, both as ambassadors and as part of the copyright cleanup effort, may wish to participate in that discussion too. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:31, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Two questions about student contributions

I am working through some student contributions and ran into a couple of things I'd like advice on.

• Student Mallika.sharma created Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Non-banking_Financial_Company; the creation was declined. It was weakly/incompletely sourced. The English is poor enough that I doubt it is a direct copyvio. Is it OK just to leave this alone?
• Student Abhinav619 created Challenges of inflationary policy in India, and is the author of almost all the text in it. (It should probably be moved to Inflation in India, but that's another issue.) Sources are given but there are no citations, so per Nitika's instructions, if this were not a student-created article I would simply move all the student's text to the talk page with a note that it would have to be cited appropriately. I can't do that in this case; what should be done instead? I'm inclined to move it to Inflation in India and replace all the text with a redirect to Inflation until someone else gets around to writing this article. Any comments on that approach?

Thanks for any help. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 05:47, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

• Hi Mike. Re Non-banking Financial Company, I've seen a lot worse articles than this passed through AfC. It's a bit of a lottery depending who's reviewing. Having said that, I would just just leave this in the editor's user space for them to further improve (if they want) and note on the Clean-up/student list that it has no copyvio.

  Re Challenges of inflationary policy in India, again this is not that bad an article, certainly not so bad as to redirect. I'd leave it in place, move to Inflation in India, add any appropriate maintenance tags, and above all add {{WikiProject Economics}} and {{WikiProject India}} to the talk page as well as {{IEP assignment}}. (There are some specialised banners for individual IEP classes, but this will do in a pinch.) That way we can keep track of the IEP articles after the thing finishes. More importantly, the WikiProject banners give the subject-specialised projects a greater chance of finding it and possibly dealing with it in the perspective of the other articles within their scope. The maintenance tags are useful because most projects priortise their work via their cleanup lists.

  In general. I think we have to be careful about shooting these IEP articles at dawn, unless they are copyvio (although after a whole day of dealing with them, I get sorely tempted). The only time I remove material (apart from copyvio), redirect, or propose for deletion is if the material is so garbled as to be incomprehensible and requiring a complete rewrite, it essentially duplicates an existing article without adding anything new or helpful, or is dumped into an existing article where it is clearly not an improvement, and in fact a detriment.

  Frankly, I don't agree with Nitika's instructions about putting removed chunks of material on the talk page. It clutters up the talk page and serves no useful purpose. Instead simply note on the talk page that some material was removed and why and then link to the diff, e.g. [16]. Anyone who wants to work on the removed material has access to the history. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 10:04, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

• For the AFC submission, the article already exists at Non-banking financial company. MER-C 10:33, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I left the student a note about it. I see from the student's talk page that their instructor approved the title/subject. Unfortunately this has happened a lot in the IEP. The instructors are approving topics without actually checking themselves that it isn't already covered in an existing article. I wonder if they were told to do this during the training sessions (were the instructors trained at all?) and more importantly, how to search. This has been a particular problem with the IEP because of a shaky grasp of English capitalisation conventions and a seeming lack of acquaintance with WP:TITLEFORMAT and WP:MOS generally. Thus they see Non-banking Financial Company as a red link and simply assume there is no article about it. Voceditenore (talk) 11:04, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice above. I have been deleting unsourced material from the students since that was what Nitika's instructions said to do, given the high likelihood of copyvio. If we feel that the upcoming CCI will address those issues I'll leave unsourced material in place from now on -- I don't like to delete material without definitely knowing it's a copyvio, but I could also see why that approach was suggested. If I do keep deleting unsourced material, I agree that a diff link on the talk page is a better approach; I'll do that instead. For Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Non-banking_Financial_Company my concern was mostly that it's not in article space -- are these requests typically left sitting in project talk space forever if unsuccessful, or should it be deleted? If it's not to be deleted I will leave a link to it on the talk page of the current article MER-C linked to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:57, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Note on duplicate students

I've just realized that some students appear in multiple sections of the student page, presumably since they took multiple classes. When I've been investigating a student's contributions I've been going through everything theyji did and noting all results in the comments column. I'm about to go back through my own updates and copy them to other locations on the page where the student appears. I think it would be sensible for anyone who is checking on the students work to search for their name on this page to see if it's already been checked by another editor. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:23, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm going through and adding my notes in other locations for those students but I'm not filling in the OA comments column if there is an OA name and the cleanup column (not the OA comments column) already has cleanup notes. I assume this is the simplest approach but if I should fill in the OA comments too, let me know. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:57, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

If you find duplicate students, just cross-reference them in either comments section (Im going to later run a check on this and cross reference all dupes). Currently, we are in the process of bringing that page to a common format. The cleanup comments column is part of the new format, and thus has some rules attached to it. The OA commentji column, after the reformat will be kept for reference, and not edited at all. J When the reformat is over, everyone involved in the cleanup will be notified on how to use it. For now, you may just use the oa comments column (add your comments in a bulleted list if there already is something there). If you want to use the cleanup comments column, just check out the proposed guidelines here (not all of it is relevant) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 18:47, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I'll stick with the OA comments column as I am not experienced at copyvio detection. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:48, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Commons image help

A student uploaded File:Money111.jpg which I am not sure about the copyright status for -- are the images on banknotes copyrighted? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:54, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

My understanding is that it depends on the country, but that it is not ok in India [17]. The image itself seems to come from the RBI [18], which claims copyright of their site, so I'd assume the copyright would hold for that image without evidence otherwise. - Bilby (talk) 03:21, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

The Copyright Act in India gives a 60 year copyright to government images/designs. etc. in general. Would need careful reading to ascertain the exact rule position though. AshLin (talk) 03:50, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

I put if up for a deletion discussion at Commons [19]. Even if the banknotes themselves were out of copyright (which the don't seem to be), this is a collage with artistic input in the arrangement and colouring, not a straight-on image of a banknote. Anyhow, the experts there will know what to do about it. Voceditenore (talk) 06:36, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

But wait, there's more! File:Southasia111.jpg and File:SOUTHASIADEV.jpg are suspect imagevios: the gray strip at the top of the latter indicates it's likely to be a poorly cropped screenshot from some internet accessible database. I'm not sure if the data itself may be copyrightable (it depends on how it is compiled) but the presentation probably is.

By the way, doesn't anyone teach these students table markup or how to use an image editor?! This reminds me of a certain type of horrible Youtube video. MER-C 09:13, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, to the newbie, table markup, whether taught or not, is pretty confusing. And I doubt the IEP would put more effort into teaching them table formatting as most of them won't need it anyways. Regarding the images, we'll have to probably look at all the IEP uploads, too, and fix them.. Anyways, I replaced the ugly image with a slightly less ugly comp-generated one (I used MS Word.. rather unorthodox, but its rather usefull for quick stuff like this). Ideally, it should be made svg or png, but I'm not going to start doing that. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 11:28, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

It's not hard to point out and understand Help:Table or one of those leaflet thingies the WMF are so fond of. The images just keep getting better: File:Bowen's diagram 2.jpg and File:MU and TU of taxation.jpg. Do these students even look at their uploads before (or after) inserting them into the article?! (I won't fix these diagrams as I'm not familiar with the underlying economic models and hence can't tell whether they are correct. The camcorder diagram is just the market for financial capital where D = demand = investment, S = supply = saving and r = the real interest rate. This isn't obvious at all.) MER-C 11:51, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

OK, those are terrible. And not fixable. And shouldn't be on WP in the first place. OK, they are fixable if you know enough about the particular subtopic (I'm not). I really see no reason why someone would draw a diagram (I hate doing that), when their computer can draw the straight lines for them. Regarding the WP:Table, I seriously doubt that the students would read that if it was given in a pile of stuff along with WP:V/WP:NPOV/etc (I don't think the students thoroughly read these, either). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:42, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Mailing list discussion

See here. Starts in the message "Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail" by Srikanth Lakshmanan. It includes this scathing criticism of the WMF, which was forwarded to foundation-l. Enjoy. MER-C 05:14, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

The worrying thing is that some are thinking or repeating the process [20]. If it is to go forward I'm recommend using Wikipedia:Articles for creation as a way to minimise the damage. Thats the on-wiki process for new articles by new editors.--Salix (talk): 11:52, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

The poster of that message is one of two people who are responsible for running this program. I prefer an external sandbox because the IEP project may crowd out other newbies at AFC via backlogs. (AFC is currently backlogged). MER-C 12:00, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

I would have liked to see the IEP next semester planning discussion started on en-wiki at the same time, given the impact it has had. I've left a note for Annie Lin to that effect. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:47, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Just chiming in, I think that its fine to repeat the IEP, as long as they do it at a very small scale, and keep the community in the loop (And well involved in all the planning processes). There should be atleast one community member on-site, who has lots of experience (WikimediaIndia should have quite a few such contributors). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:21, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

The thing that keeps making me facepalm, and it's been said both in that mailing list thread and in various other places where IEP was discussed, is this concept of "well, we don't have enough qualified mentors to assist the number of students we want to include. I know, let's bring in mentors who have even less experience than the students!" In what universe is that the choice to make, rather than "Ok, we only have enough competent mentors for X students. I guess we only have room for X students this time around. Maybe we'll gain more mentors as time passes"? Why would you supplement the "workforce" with people who patently don't know how to do their jobs, rather than just cutting down the number of students, especially in a pilot program where the goal is to test how things work?

I get that a whole lot of things went wrong, from a whole lot of different causes, in this program. But the desire to slap inexperienced people, many of whom had never even edited Wikipedia, into advisory and leadership roles for this program strikes me as one of the worst, especially when they had, according to those emails, eager local community members available who were being shut out in favor of "ambassadors" who didn't understand Wikipedia. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:49, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi everyone, I posted this on my user talk page too because Mike left me a message about this topic, but I'll repost what I said here as well:

The local India staff team members (Hisham, Nitika) and some of the San Francisco -based Global Education staff team members (myself included) had a long, in-depth meeting yesterday to talk about the future of the education program in India. One thing we talked about at length is whether to continue any in-class activities next semester (spring 2012), or instead to focus in the spring on doing post-mortem analysis and wait until after spring to start working with any classes. As you said, there are big risks to running in-class activities before we have adequate time to make a thorough analysis of what exactly needs to be changed to make the program in India more successful, and we discussed these risks at length during our meeting yesterday, with many people arguing for waiting until at least June before working with any more classes. We decided that Hisham and Nitika will make the call (soon) on whether or not any in-class activities will take place next semester based on these discussions, since they are the people who run the program in India. So we'll have more exact updates on that afterward, but rest assured that we share your concerns 100%!

Everyone was also in agreement that the post-mortem analysis and the planning process absolutely need to be a dialogue between the Wikimedia Foundation and the community. One of the mistakes we made this past semester was that we did not involve the community sufficiently in the planning, and we definitely want to change that. Various community members have been involved in the Pune pilot (thank you all for your help) and have a lot of knowledge at this point about what the outcomes and challenges of the pilot were and how those affected the larger English Wikipedia, so I think any analysis and planning process in the coming months will be inadequate if these community members are not an active part of the conversation. We'll like to use a variety of communication channels for the analysis/planning since each channel has its pro's and con's. So, be on the lookout for that soon as well! Annie Lin (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 20:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

One of the mistakes we made this past semester was that we did not involve the community sufficiently in the planning, and we definitely want to change that.

I just wish I had more faith in WMF having recognised the truth of the first part, and more hope that they'd take a useful approach to the second. So far though, nothing about this whole mess gives me any confidence. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:33, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Hear hear. MER-C 09:12, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I was one of those participating in that thread and other forks about the IEP. The one thing that consistently stands out it they are refusing to acknowledge a) they carefully avoid acknowledging that they need to scale down b)that the campus ambassadors must have more editing experience. After a while the discussion bogged down to no of edits a campus ambassador has and became ugly. The horde of CAs that descended into the discussion repeatedly keep claiming that the pilot was a success (a view shared by sue gardner). The CAs and the WMF IEP team, still refuse to acknowledge that they need more article editing experience in en wiki to handle such a program.

Even after all the heat, i am not surprised to hear Hisham and Nitika will make the call (soon) on whether or not any in-class activities will take place next semester based on these discussions. The very possibility that "in-class activities" may continue next semester with exactly the same setup despite all that has happened shows how wrong WMF's attitude toward the program is. I am reproducing kudpung's table on CA edits from meta

CA edits

User 1st edit Total edits Mainspace en:User:Gsinghglakes 18 September 323 21 en:User:Ramshankaryadav May 696 41 w:en:User:Seva.panda 3 June 14 1 w:en:User:Arnavchaudhary June 117 23 en:User:Wasimmogal2007 12 Sept 2010 316 6 w:en:User:Pallaviagarwal90 28 August 109 10 w:en:User:Mihir.khatwani June 240 20 w:en:User:Tambeparag July 171 86 w:en:User:U.raghavendra June 39 6 w:en:User:AbhiSuryawanshi May 343 59 w:en:User:Rangilo_Gujarati February 1,210 206 w:en:User:ALX999 May 79 8 w:en:User:Mihir_Kelkar 31 August 9 3 w:en:User:Pratiklahoti8004 July 532 51 w:en:User:Gunit31 August 137 28 w:en:User:Devanshi_tripathi August 571 278 w:en:User:Anurag_acj 25 July 128 22 w:en:User:Vaibhavchandak 28 July 172 43 w:en:User:User:Debastein1 24 July 838 133 (user 244) w:en:User:Vedantgupta7890 29 July 117 62 w:en:User:Minakshinajardhane 27 July 128 28 w:en:User:Nikita.agarwal 21 August 137 51 w:en:User:Shefalinaik 28 July 73 19 w:en:User:Roshnisaigal 30 July 188 96 w:en:User:Ishu.aghav 3 September 28 6 w:en:User:Arjunmangol 30 July 302 45 w:en:User:Tb0412 8 July 93 39 w:en:User:Kumarvikramsingh 6 September 29 3 w:en:User:RDebashruti 21 August 29 2

These are the sort of people the WMF offers as a solution to handle an ever expanding education program.

Despite all the issues we have raised and the large number of regular editors who have spoken out, the WMF a)refuses to acknowledge outright that the IEP pilot was a disaster b) is thinking about continuing the same program for the next semester c) still thinks throwing more inexperienced CAs into program will take care of things.

Unless something drastic happens from the en wiki community side - like an RFAR MER-C mentions or a blanket ban on student articles, i have no faith in the WMFs ability to self correct. --Sodabottle (talk) 10:11, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

• The problem wasn't with the CAs themselves. The problem was that the organizers expected them to do what CA's are not meant to do, regardless of how much experience they have. I'm not sure what the thinking was behind that, especially given how inexperienced they were. The real problem was that the IEP organizers (somewhat late in the day) recruited "out of process" Online Ambassadors, the majority of whom were completely non-participative, and worse, even less experienced than the CAs! It was claimed that these IEP OAs had been trained. I'd be curious to know by whom and on what. Three of them had added copyvio to WP, for one thing. Another three of them are listed on the IEP course pages with no link whatsoever to their user account, if they even had one. Then after three months of chaos, when it was plain that the vast majority of these OAs weren't editing on Wikipedia at all, let alone mentoring students, they were assigned to clean up the copyvio. Note that I'm not referring here to the US CAs who were brought in later to help with the copyvio clean-up. Voceditenore (talk) 11:11, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

We (IEP OAs) were given a roughly one hour long lecture focused primarily on the goals/structure of the program and another hour long IRC session in which there was some role playing of assisting students. I'd be happy to forward the lecture notes to anyone interested. I'd also be happy to pass along the emails we received. I think they would be instructive to anyone wishing to analyze how and why this program failed. Danger ^{High voltage!} 15:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

WMF EP quantitative analysis conference 22 November

There's an online conference presenting quantitative analysis of the IEP (mostly) occurring at 16:00 UTC, 22 November (see here for your timezone). More information is available at outreach:Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting. The general community is welcome to attend; we need a few people there to ask the hard questions and disrupt the inevitable WMF circlejerk. (I won't be attending myself, time = midnight for me).

I also note with disdain this official WMF blog post, which is extolling the virtues of expanding the EP without regard to community health.

P.S. Why aren't the Foundation staff posting this? (Cross posted to WT:USEP.) MER-C 05:50, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I notice they only have capacity for 25 participants so get there early. Jojalozzo 15:54, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I've replied to MER-C's post at WT:USEP, but please note that this meeting is not "mostly" about the India Education Program -- it is a high-level overview of activity happening in education programs around the world on several different language versions of Wikipedia. India is one of five countries we will discuss during the meeting. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Reformat finished

The reformatting of WP:IEPS is finished (a few trivial things are left, which can be done later).
For all of you involved in the cleanup, here are the rules for editing the tables:

• Please check all edits made by a student, not only the IEP-related ones. Also, check if a student has already been commented on/cleaned up on a different course (many students have enrolled for multiple IEP courses) before proceeding.
• Explain what you have changed in the edit summary. If you have changed some data (not if you have added a comment), please sign the "Last local table update: signature/date" hatnote with ~~~~ (you may have to remove an older sign).
• All comments now go in the "cleanup comments" section. They should be placed in bulleted lists (using *), with the recentmost comment up top. Precede the comment with a timestamp, using {{subst:ISO8601}}. Please sign the comments.
• When you are done checking, update the "Cleanup status" column with the status (using a timestamped bulleted list like the "Cleanup comments" column). Use the following statuses: "Checked:OK", "Checked:Copyvios/Blanked", "Checked:Copyvios/Not blanked", "Not sure", and "Unchecked". If you want to add more detailed info, use the "cleanup comments" column. Wrap the cell with {{yes}}, {{no}}, {{partial}} templates according to the latest check. (Yes for "Checked,OK", No for "copyvio", Partial for "not sure"). Note that these templates only work if their opening braces touch the "|" of the table cell. E.g:

(The 2nd column is the comments column, and the third is the status column.
|blah
|*{{subst:ISO8601}}: Have checked thoroughly, does not seem to be a copyvio. ~~~
*2011-10-19T01:14Z: I'm not too sure about the first section. [[User:Example|Example]] ([[User_talk:Example|talk]])
|{{yes|
*{{subst:ISO8601}}: Checked:OK
*2011-10-19T01:14Z: Not sure
}}
|
|
|-

Some more rules have been kept here (This page has been transcluded to the editnotice of WP:IEPS and is visible to whoever tries to edit the page).
If you have any queries, please post them below.
Thanks, ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 09:42, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

I have a couple of questions.

• I've been posting in the OA column, as I have no copyright cleanup experience; do you want me to not do that any longer? Do you need me to move my past comments to the cleanup column?
• It looks like you're considering this as an article by article cleanup, so that the comments apply to the article listed in that row. I don't think that's a good idea -- the students often didn't work on the article listed, but worked on another article, or multiple articles, instead. In addition, I've found it's much more efficient to check all a student's contributions when I get to that student, and make an annotation that refers to all their work. If you look at my comments you'll see that they are identical for each instance of the student. Search for "vastu1706" and you'll see what I mean. The result is that the comments you give as an example would not be meaningful, because you'd have to qualify which article you're talking about.
• Finally, I'm curious as to why so much effort is being put into reformatting this page. So much of what the students have done is being completely removed that in many cases there's nothing for a returning cleanup pass to do. See this section, for example, and read the first half dozen comments; I don't think there's much left to examine. Add to that the fact that most students appear in the list two or three times at least, and that the cleanup work done so far has probably dealt with perhaps a third of the page already, and I'm not sure that this is such a big project after all -- at the current rate, about another two weeks will probably see it completed. I have no CCI background so pardon me if I'm missing something here.

Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:24, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Answers:

• No, the past comments can stay where they are (You can move them if you want, just set the timestamp to 'unknown'). You do not need copyright cleanup experience to use the cleanup columns, just common sense. The CCI people will do a check later for anything we've missed.
• Actually, it's a student by student cleanup. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. You must check the contribs of all the students in a row, clean up whatever is necessary, and report the findings. I don't see how that would make the comments not meaningful. You can qualify the article, and add another comment for the next article.

I've added a note above on how to handle multiple students.

• Because the whole thing was rather haphazard before. One of the problems with different formats is that its hard to see what's going on fully. The other problem was that exporting the student/article data to a machine-readable list was a big headache (And this is needed if you want to keep an eye on the students or do some repetitive task). Actually, it wasn't much 'effort' to reformat the tables (I had a script), just a bit boring. Regarding your estimate, I (and I think most of the others) would disagree that it will take a few weeks to complete this (Read some of the discussions above, for example the "Common format-consensus" one). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:18, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Mike, this was discussed in other threads further up. Even if most of the students' contributions will have to be deleted in the end (a pity, but not our fault), you need a solid database to work on. So far, we haven't had anything like this. The various lists in other places have been incomplete, outdated, faulty, contradicting and inconsistent. Tons of articles were missing. We still find "new" IEP students by accident, which have not been listed so far. And some students have created more than one account or have been editing under IP addresses. Basing your work on this mess, you will be able to investigte some edits, but you will also miss many, even if you carefully check a student's other edits. The full article list to be checked could (and will) be automatically derived from a full students list, but we maintained the articles in the master table as well, since in several cases we found "new" IEP students by checking edits of originally listed or related articles, which have been in the scope of the programme. So, in order to get a complete list of students, we will have to reverse-lookup and check any editor, who edited an article im the past months, if they might have some connection with IEP. Some of this can be automated, but only after the tables on the master list were brought into a uniform table format, so that it can be parsed by scripts easily. Another reason for the table reformatting is the fact, that in order to force anyone to work on a single database (the only way to avoid synchronisation problems) we deleted the various distributed lists in other places (after carefully merging the info). Most of the info is not relevant for any cleanup efforts, but if it wouldn't have been relevant for the local community (instructors etc.) they would not have added it to the tables. After all, they still have to evaluate the students' work to determine if they have passed their courses or not. If we'd just delete their stuff without consideration, our efforts could hardly be seen as an attempt of a cooperation, and a complete lack of communication and cooperation (from their side) is what has caused this chaos in the first place. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:47, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses; I didn't mean to complain, just check on a couple of things. I'll start adding my comments to the cleanup column and stop adding them to the OA column. One remaining issue: what I meant by "not meaningful" is that "I'm not too sure about the first section" (the given example comment) doesn't mean anything if the row refers to multiple articles. Anyway, if the comments I've already been making are acceptable I will continue to use that format (in the new column) since I have worked out a fairly efficient process for doing them that way. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:09, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Make sure that you still timestamp and bullet the comments, whatever format you use. Regarding the example comment, it wasn't exactly an example comment, it was just to display how one should use {{yes}} and the timestamps. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:28, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

One more question: if I find copyright issues currently I am just deleting the material, and leaving an appropriate note, both here and in the edit summary. Technically this material should be revdeleted, I gather. Should I be flagging these for revdel? If so, what's the best way to do that? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:30, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

And one more; if an article listed was not in fact worked on by a student, should I delete that article from that row of the table? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:47, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

When I search for copyvios I only check online sources. If I find nothing I will add "could not detect copyvio" to the comments on that article, and will add "Checked: OK" as the status, even though I've not checked offline sources. Let me know if that's not OK; and also please take a look at the first few edits I make here and let me know if there are other changes you need me to make. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:06, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it should be revdeled, that will be done during the CCI. You can flag them if you wish (that will reduce the CCI workload), but it is not necessary to do so. Don't remove articles from the list, the list isn't only for the cleanup (The profs need it, too).

Yes, it is understood that we can't easily check offline sources, so an online check is enough. Fortunately, if something is copied from a textbook, it is usually obvious example (atleast for most of the IEP edits I've seen). These can be safely blanked. If you're not sure, use the "not sure" option. Also, if you want to check out textbooks, you can do a Google Book search of the text in question.

By the way, don't forget to add the yesno templates to the cleanup status. This will primarily help the CCI (and us) understand what is needed at a glance (yes means it's clean, no means that it needs revdelling, partial means the cleanup-er wasn't sure). I have added them to one of the tables. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 02:11, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the example edit; that was helpful. I'll put the yes/no/partials in. Please keep an eye on my updates and let me know if there's anything else I need to change about the way I'm doing them. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:40, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Watchlist dumps updated.

Since the reformat is over, I was able to update our watchlist dumps. The "Watchlist dump" pages contain text to copy-paste into your raw watchlist. The "Watchlist" pages are watchlist-like pages for the list of articles/etc in question (If you don't want to bloat your watchlist).
Here they are:

• Articles: Watchlist dump; Watchlist
• Sandboxes: Watchlist dump; Watchlist
• Students: Watchlist dump; Watchlist; Combined contribs (you have to scroll down)

Enjoy! ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 14:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Great, thanks! --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:43, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

If anyone wants it, here's the script I use for generating the lists. It needs to be executed on WP:IEPS, using a Javascript Console (Chrome has one, I think IE and Greasemonkey have them, too). Execute the chunks separated by // separately, in order (The first chunk prepares the ground, the second chunk displays the usernames, third articles, fourth sandboxes). The last three chunks will temporarily hang your browser (or part of it.. on Chrome all Wikipedia pages are readable, but you can't type anything on them). The code is a bit badly written (I wrote it in a rush), but it works:

Script

$.fn.removeCol = function(col){ // Make sure col has value if(!col){ col = 1; } $('tr td:nth-child('+col+'), tr th:nth-child('+col+')', this).remove(); return this; }; function getLink(str){ var ret if(str.indexOf("index.php")!=-1){ ret=str.split("title=")[1].split("&")[0]; }else{ ret=str.split("/wiki/")[1] } return unescape(ret).replace(/_/ig," ").split("#")[0] } function compareLinks(l1,l2){ s1=getLink(l1.href) s2=getLink(l2.href) if(s1>s2){ return 1; }else if(s1<s2){ return -1 } return 0; } var a=document.getElementsByClassName("IEPtable") doc = document.createElement("body"); for(i=0;i<a.length;i++){ doc.appendChild(a[i]) } document.body=doc; for(i=5;i<13;i++){ $(".IEPtable").removeCol(5) } $(".IEPtable").removeCol(1) users=[] userC=0 articles=[] articleC=0 sandboxes=[] sandboxC=0; a=document.getElementsByTagName("a") for(i=0;i<a.length;i++){ h=getLink(a[i].href) if(h.indexOf("User:")!=-1){ if(h.indexOf("andbox")!=-1||h.indexOf("/")!=-1){ sandboxes[sandboxC]=a[i] sandboxC++; }else{ users[userC]=a[i] userC++ } } if(h.indexOf("User:")==-1&&h.indexOf("User talk:")==-1&&h.indexOf("Special:Contributions")==-1&&a[i].innerHTML.indexOf("YOUR ARTICLE")==-1){ articles[articleC]=a[i] articleC++ } } // document.body.innerHTML="" users=users.sort(compareLinks) for(j=0;j<users.length;j++){ document.body.innerHTML+="[["+getLink(users[j].href)+"]]<BR> "; } // document.body.innerHTML="" articles=articles.sort(compareLinks) for(j=0;j<articles.length;j++){ document.body.innerHTML+="[["+getLink(articles[j].href)+"]]<BR> " } // document.body.innerHTML="" sandboxes=sandboxes.sort(compareLinks) for(j=0;j<sandboxes.length;j++){ document.body.innerHTML+="[["+getLink(sandboxes[j].href)+"]]<BR> " }

ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 15:47, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Cool! It appears the students have stopped making major edits but I'll wait a week or so before running the CCI program just in case. MER-C 03:37, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Remember that not all student usernames have been added to the IEPS table. We may need to manually backcheck from the articles (If the WMF doesn't supply them.. they filled in most, but a few are still left. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 10:26, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

The CCI program can be run incrementally -- it doesn't require the list to be complete (but we do). The sooner we start systematically cleaning up this mess (after my exams, 3 days now), the better. MER-C 11:57, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Once you/Moonriddengirl/etc start the CCI, could you ensure that you log all cleanups to the master list? I don't want the OAs to have to duplicate the effort. You could either write "Cleaned by CCI" in the "Cleanup comments" using a timestamped bulleted list (see above), or I could add a separate column for the CCI.

Note that if a student is marked as 'checked' by an OA, it still will need a CCI, but your job will be easier. The OAs will have done internet copyvio checks and commonsense "looks like it was copied" checks, and blanked any copyvios. We will still need someone to revdel the stuff, and a final confirming check by the CCI (which knows much more about copyright than the OAs do). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 07:40, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

I think shutting down the OA cleanup on the master list and redirecting the OAs to the CCI would be a better solution. MER-C 09:47, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

The issue with that is that not all OAs have copyright experience (Not all are generally wiki-aware, either). This point has been brought up a few times before (on this same page), so it would be better if the OAs to stay out of the CCI. They can do the bulk of the cleanup while the CCI can doublecheck and tie up the loose ends. That way, the CCI isn't overburdened, and the cleanup is still done systematically. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:10, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with repurposing a CCI as a general cleanup listing, it is, after all much more thorough than what the WMF made up on the spot. Instead of removing the diff listing -- something I was going to recommend against anyway with a messagebox and instruction modification, we should use multiple comments with OA comments being explicitly marked as such (example follows):

• Poverty in India: (+1267)(+1195)(+3227)

• OA comment: seems OK User:Example OA 09:25, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
• Y reverted MER-C 09:25, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't want the people at CCI doing any more work or form-filling than they have to, especially if it is due to WMF incompetence. We are stretched far enough as it is. MER-C 09:25, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

I think I'm going to stop the cleanup efforts I've been doing; I think the experts who do CCI work are going to do a better job than I've been able to do and I don't want to duplicate effort. There aren't many editors doing OA cleanup here so it might be OK just to shut it down here and move to CCI. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:18, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree, though I have nothing against the OAs helping out at the CCI (the community may oppose it, though). Anyways, you seem to be just about the only active cleanup OA. If the CCI people are fine with it, you could help them out in the way MER-C suggested. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

We're fine with CCI taking over now if that's what you all would like. We certainly feel like it's our responsibility to facilitate the cleanup efforts as much as we can, but our U.S. OAs are in the crunch time for supporting their students right now, so honestly I doubt much more cleanup will happen from their end for another few weeks. We're certainly happy to ask for more help again after the term wraps up in the United States, because we're committed to ensuring cleanup happens, but if CCI is ready to take on the project now, we welcome the help. We'll stop asking our OAs for help at this time to let the CCI process happen, but do let us know if you'd ever like us to resume it. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I have no qualm with OAs continuing cleanup at the CCI as long as the format above is followed and their comments are labelled as OA comments.

The best way you can facilitate the cleanup right now is to supply a full list of student usernames. My request for such a list made in the IRC office hour last month was neglected. We cobbled up one ourselves based on the information we have, but I strongly suspect it is incomplete given that it was rather poorly maintained throughout the semester. MER-C 08:01, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Yep, the list I've generated is based on WP:IEPS, which is still incomplete. On a whim, I just checked out the database that Frank Schulenburg uses to run the student-o-meter on the toolserver (anyone with a ts account can access it). I've kept the student data I gleaned here. Use this diff to see the differences between those pages. Mostly, we have student usernames that the WMF does not, though they do have some that we don't. If you find any (most of the red lines are due to bad diff alignment), try to add it to this table (if you can find where the username fits in the other tables, that's fine, too), and then to this list if you feel like it. I checked the students till E, there are still a lot more to copy. I'm going to do this with a script after a while (I didn't expect there to be so many extras so I started by hand).

Remember, we still don't have all usernames, this is just a bunch of 100-odd extras.
ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:43, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I have added more usernames. The list (almost) looks complete besides 10 usernames from the class "Machine Drawings & Computer Graphics". I have mailed the professor for this class asking for usernames. I'll add the remaining 10 usernames as soon as I get the list. Nitika.t (talk) 06:12, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Added more. Only 1 or 2 missing now. Nitika.t (talk) 10:30, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Indian Education Program is now live

I have run my CCI program on the union of the lists I posted here. The output is Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Indian Education Program and 4 other subpages.

36 of 770 users on the above lists do not correspond to actual accounts:

• User:Aau 74
• User:Akshayahire
• User:Amtrathod19911
• User:Arun.shetty
• User:Ashwini Borse
• User:Atulnk12
• User:Avinash sonwane
• User:Chimidoma
• User:Hitendra Shukla
• User:Ketaki Fadnavis
• User:Leny Ann Abraham
• User:Namratagawande90
• User:Neeraj k
• User:Nikhila.elec
• User:Pankaj bagul
• User:Podutwarsamiksha
• User:Pratik Nadagouda
• User:Pravin 24
• User:Prerna chowhan
• User:Rajeshjadhav
• User:Rasika25
• User:Rathodamit
• User:Rupa burman roy
• User:Shrikrushnalekurwale
• User:Snehalbagde
• User:Sonal.W
• User:Srivastava.abhinav
• User:Sumantjoshi
• User:Supriya.c
• User:Vaibhav Chaudhari
• User:Yogesh Sangle
• User:Pramodrokade
• User:Surajbmaske
• User:Abhishek s.sharma User:Abhishek santosh sharma

The following users have contributions prior to the IEP:

• User:ALX999
• User:Antz.bin
• User:Jinchurikidan
• User:Poonam
• User:Purplesky91
• User:Shash

The final list comes out to be 736 users, less than the 1000 or so in the relevant boasts. As such, I still believe the list is incomplete. Please read the instructions and check for additional students when auditing, which you should inform me of. (As mentioned above, the CCI program is incremental so what's here doesn't need to be updated.) Have phun! MER-C 10:38, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Other than trying to figure this out from the main students page, is there a list which covers whether or not these have already been checked? Or do we need to compare each one against the existing student's page? - Bilby (talk) 10:47, 26 November 2011 (UTC) Forget it. The first one I looked at had extensive copyvio in the first two lines that was missed when it was checked before, and that was checked by someone with extensive experience. :( I'll muddle through. - Bilby (talk) 11:04, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I'll start going through the stuff soon. Just a note, even though it does not fall within the scope of the CCI, could you also tag camcorder'd pics? Use {{Cleanup-image}} or {{SVG}}. It doesn't take much extra time and it saves useful diagrams from deletion. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 16:15, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

The CCI has been updated to include a further 19 students. This brings the total to 755. MER-C 11:32, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Another batch of students

From Wikipedia:India Education Program/Courses/Fall 2011/Computer Organization and Advanced Microprocessing.

The following users do not exist:

• User:Harsha.dabhade
• User:Nikita.kalyani
• User:Swapnali.akhade
• User:Vijay.garad

The following users have contributions prior to the IEP:

• User:Pallaviagarwal90

This takes the CCI up to 823 students. MER-C 03:42, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Bot approved--any more tasks?

The BRFA for User:Manishbot had been approved. I am letting the bot tag IEP talkpages with {{IEP assignment}}, and userpages with {{User WikiProject India Education Program}}.
Now, in this discussion, a sort of "beware of copyvio" message was proposed (to be posted on talk pages of articles). Should we go through with it? I'm copying the original proposal here:

== 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. ~~~~

Now, we may need to change the last line to "..policies, please check the article for any copyvios...", and add something about the grammatical errors, but otherwise it looks OK (Though I'm not sure if we need to go through this at all).
Thoughts?

Also, please let me know if there are any other automated tasks that the cleanup needs (I may need another BRFA for them, though). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 12:51, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Learnings, another mailing list discussion and planning for IEP v2.0

From [21]:

I'm writing to share an update on the way forward as far as making sure that we adequately capture all the learnings possible from the India Education Program. We also want to make sure that these learnings are robust and are incorporated into the core program design going forward. We also would like these learnings to also be of an adequately granular level so that we can identify trends of what doesn't work and what might work better - such as year of students, nature of faculty involvement, subject area, etc.

We are planning multiple channels to capture, analyse and incorporate these learnings.

• WMF has commissioned a researcher, Tory Read, to conduct an evaluative study of the IEP and provide recommendations for improvement. Over the course of next few days, she will be interviewing several teachers, students, CAs, Directors, admins and other wikipedia editors from the global community to take their input and views about IEP. She has already spoken to staff in SF, spent the day with us in Delhi and will be in Pune over the next 4 days conducting face-to-face interviews. She will also be reaching out to community members outside of Pune. She will then write an evaluative story about what worked, what did not and learnings from the the pilot.

• A series of video interviews were done by a Campus Ambassador in Pune - Abhishek Suryawanshi who conducted interviews with students, professors and Campus Ambassadors in Pune. We promised all interviewees that any personal identifying information would be removed from this analysis to encourage them to speak freely.

• In addition, India Programs consultants (Hisham & I) and Wikimedia Foundation staff (Frank Schulenburg and LiAnna Davis) are interviewing experienced Wikipedia editors from India and across the world. Please do mail me (at nitika@wikimedia.org) if any one of us can contact you to ask your views (if we already have not.)

• We want to collate data points to be able to analyze and draw out trends. Here is an example of data that we're trying to dig out (and this is just a sub-set of a preliminary list)

• What's the amount of data that students have added to Wikipedia? What's the amount of data that got reverted? What's the net amount of information that the students have added on Wikipedia?
• How many students edited articles outside of their in-class assignments?
• How many student's got warnings on their talk pages? How many students corrected their errors after these warnings?
• How many students got blocked? / How many students got blocked more than once?

• At the WikiConference India we also had a IEP round table where we invited a couple of students, professors and campus ambassadors to share their personal views and experience working with IEP pilot. I'm going to upload the video if it's possible and share this with you. It was a very useful session where we discussed many of the points that will inform our future work - such as determining whether it should be voluntary or not, what student's were thinking while they engaged in copy-pasting into their articles, improvements to Campus Ambassador training, ideas on what kind of professors can work best on a project of this nature, etc.

• The Learnings Page is my *very* preliminary draft at collating learnings from the pilot and exploring how how we can incorporate these in our way forward.

We will shortly summaries of all these findings as and when they are ready - and welcome an open discussion on them. Do please share your thoughts and suggestions on the above. Please also do let me know if I've missed out anything. Nitika.t 11:31, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes you have. You did not post it on this page.

This was also posted on the wikimediaindia-l, starts here, thread name is "IEP Pilot - Preliminary Analysis". These discussions reference an early draft document containing the plan for the second iteration of the IEP. MER-C 05:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Rather amusingly someone on the mailing list suggested that a few questions along the lines of "how much effort was spent cleaning up the mess" should be added, only to be told they were being too negative. [22] Hut 8.5 09:36, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Ram Shankar Yadav is a campus ambassador for the program. MER-C 12:26, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

So, how much donor money has been spent physically flying consultants to and from SF and Pune throughout this program? Danger ^{High voltage!} 20:59, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

First or cattle class? (actually you don't wanna know, really) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:32, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

The discussion continues here, same thread title. The list of people being interviewed is here, see also User talk:Toryread. MER-C 03:17, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for posting a link to the interview list, I was just about to put it on my talk page. One modification: I haven't yet posted questions to Wikipedians on the list who prefer email or talk pages as the interview method, so those people will have through the end of this week to provide input on the questions.Toryread (talk) 23:29, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Here is a list of work I am doing on the Pune Pilot Review: 20 hours in US reviewing talk pages and email list communication regarding IEP; Interviews (in person, unless otherwise noted): - Barry Newstead, WMF SF - Frank Schulenburg, WMF SF - Annie Lin, WMF SF - LiAnna Davis, WMF SF - Hisham Mundol, WMF India - Nitika Tandon, WMF India - Shiju Alex, WMF India - Ram Shankar Yadav, CA Pune - Ishita Ghosh, professor, SSE, Pune - informal conversation with 2 SSE students and 2 CAs over lunch in Pune - Rashmi Barua, SSE student - Devanchi Tripathi, SSE student and CA - 3 members of Pune WP community (one doesn't want his name here, so I'm not naming any of them), group interview over dinner - Abhilasha Sharma, SSE student - Anushikha Benazur, SSE student - Dr. Jyoti Chandiramani, SSE Director - 3 more SSE students, informal conversation over lunch - Debanjan Bandyopadhyay, CA SSE - Radha Misra, professor, SNDT Women's College, Pune - Shweta Shinde, student, COEP - Gautam Akiwate, student, COEP - informal conversation with 3 CAs and 1 student, COEP - Dr. Anil V. Sahasrabudhe, Director, COEP - Dr. Pradeep Waychal, professor, COEP - Kudpung, WP Admin (skype video) - Srikanth Lakshmanan, WP editor, OA for IEP (skype audio) - Hisham Mundol, WMF India (telephone) - Wasim, CA COEP - Pratik Lohati, CA COEP - Arjun M. K., CA COEP - Vaibhav Chandak, CA COEP - Prof. Abhijit Sir, professor, COEP - Bala Jeyaraman (telephone) - Moonriddengirl (telephone) - Risker (skype) - Ruud (email) - Andy Dingley (email) - Voceditenore (email) - Fluffernutter (email) - Danger (skype) - MER-C (talk page) - Matthiaspaul (email) - Cindamuse (skype) - Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development Program, WMF SF (telephone).

Data gathering closes Monday, 5 December, except I will take the statistical numbers from WMF whenever I get them, and participants via email/talk page will have through end of the week to answer because I'm just getting questions to them later today. My contract includes 20 interviews, and I am already doing many more, because I've determined that the job requires it. This list was developed in consultation with WMF staff, India WP community members, and global WP community members.Toryread (talk) 00:20, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Sincere apologies. I missed posting it on the en.wikipedia page. I'll make sure that I post updates on both the pages going forward.Nitika.t (talk) 04:05, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

FYI, I'm going completely dark from now through 12 December, 23:00 UTC. No phone, no internet, no computer. I'm looking forward to checking talk pages and beginning my synthesis when I return.Toryread (talk) 18:47, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Pilot Analysis Plan

(Cross-posting to several pages) I've just created the page Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis to document our planned analysis of the Pune pilot. We've been collecting ideas in many different places, but we wanted to have one central page where we'll be analyzing the learnings from the Pune pilot over the next few months. We will using the results of this analysis to plan our next pilot in India, which will be kicking off in mid-2012. We will not be running the India Education Program in the first term of 2012. We are committed to using the next few months to get all the learnings we can out of the analysis, so we can launch a new pilot in six months or so that addresses all of the concerns raised from the Pune pilot.

We do have one major outstanding question in terms of how to analyze the pilot, which is how do we measure the impact of the pilot on the community? I really encourage anyone who has good ideas of how to do data collection around this to contribute to the discussion on talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I also tried to leave talk page messages for everyone who had posted more than 3 times on this talk page; my apologies if I missed you! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 23:16, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Good news

Good news is that CorenBot is now back. This will be an enormous help for COPYVIO detection on new pages, but like all bots, it can make false positives, so anything CorenBot tags, must be manually verified using the duplication detector, particularly to check that it is not reporting a site that mirrors Wikipedia content. many thanks to User:Coren for the negotiations and development to get the bot up and running again.--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:21, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Given the rather primitive nature of most of the copyvios these students have produced, it seems simple enough to just run CorenSearchBot across all of the articles and try to pick off the obvious ones. That would probably make things a lot easier. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:27, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that Coren has said in the past that it isn't possible to run the bot on existing pages because of the number of false positives from mirrors. Hut 8.5 21:20, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Couldn't he just code something that searches the text added in the diff against the internet? That wouldn't get false positives from mirrors... Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:34, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that would require a hugely powerful server dedicated to the use of CorenBot. A suggestion would be to ensure that Recent Changes patrollers have the IEP articles on their watchlists and apply the process detailed at WP:NPP. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if it would still require too much processing power would be required if it were only to scan large diffs from users we're worried about (maybe future IEP participants and people who have gone through CCIs)... Calliopejen1 (talk) 05:11, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

New MediaWiki extension

See WT:USEP#New MediaWiki extension. MER-C 04:23, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

December Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

If you're interested in learning more about the Wikipedia Education Program in action around the globe, join us for the next Metrics and Activities Meeting on Tuesday, December 20 at 16:00 UTC. Please visit outreachwiki:Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting for instructions on joining and time zone conversions. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:28, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Still editing

[23]
We'd better keep an eye on the above page to ensure that none of the newer edits are copyvios (as the CCI may have already marked some students as 'cleaned', any more edits from the students won't fall under scrutiny). ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 14:41, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia Pune Club

See Grants:AbhiSuryawanshi/Wikipedia Club Pune and Grants talk:AbhiSuryawanshi/Wikipedia Club Pune--Sodabottle (talk) 07:11, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia Club Pune!

Invitation to Join Wikipedia Club Pune!

Dear IEP Followers, Your contribution(s) and passion towards Wikipedia is amazing! We made mistakes during India Education Program,Number was high,no experienced editors and many others... India Education Program Team is designing newer version of Program. Inbetween,Before IEP 2.0, We are planning to launch "Small" Wikipedia Club Pune. With limited 25 Number of students,and with experienced editors/mentors. I want Wikipedia to be a better place, I want to increase quality content on Wikipedia.But problem is (according to some people) I dont have enough experience, I am ready to accept the fact! I am newbie! But Today's Newbie one day will be experienced editor! And As newbie if I stop doing work, and stop editing Wikipedia, If I stop everything - How I am going to get Experience?? Please allow us to learn from our own mistakes,We want to correct our mistakes. And Wikipedia Club Pune is small effort with 25 students and 5+ mentors. We are having so much knowledge in India, but thats not available on Wikipedia. If we are not going to update it through our efforts, then who else is going to update that! There are two kind of people, who make fun of failed things, and who suggests improvements to failed things to avoid mistakes, I am glad to see all of yours positive behavior and suggestions to make Wikipedia a better place. All of us are working towards common goal,ways might be different,lets collaborate to have Better Wikipedia.Country with 1.2Billion people deserves better Wikipedia. As a experienced Editors and Veteran Wikipedians,I would love to invite all of you to Wikipedia Club Pune We would be graceful to have your guidance and support to make Wikipedia a better place. Wikipedia Club Pune will be fun place to edit and collaborate with like minded editors and contributors. Club will be also having exclusive interesting Activities for members. For More details, Please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune P.S : I was expecting someone else/experienced to start efforts to improve Wikipedia, but later on I realized everyone is busy, and I assume - If I start efforts, I might get support from experienced one's. Better to start things instead of waiting for someone to start,thats what I believe. As you are experienced one,And you also believe in improving Wikipedia,Lets work together.If you are doing similar kind of activities,Please do let us know, We would be more than happy to join and Help. And if you believe and if you Assume good faith , Please Register your name on Wikipedia Club Pune's Discussion Page! Keep Editing, Keep Inspiring! AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 11:34, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I've just tagged the Club Pune logo for deletion from Commons. See Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Wikipedia_Club_Pune_Golden_Globe.jpg Andy Dingley (talk) 12:11, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Indian image plagiarism

It's happening at all levels: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16390907 Andy Dingley (talk) 12:05, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Quantitative Analysis now available

Spreading the word: Ayush Khanna, a data analyst for the Foundation, has completed his quantitative analysis of the Pune Pilot. His numbers and conclusions are available at Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis/Quantitative_Analysis. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Tory's report now available

Hi all, just wanted to alert you that Tory Read has published her analysis of the Pune Pilot. We want to thank Tory for her generous time -- she went above and beyond what we had asked her to do and interviewed many more people than we'd originally planned so she could get a fuller picture of what happened during the Pune Pilot. Thanks to everyone who took the time to answer Tory's questions as well. We'll be using her report to plan the next phase of the pilot program. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

IEP draft

A draft for the new IEP is up at meta. Since the current design excludes communication with en.wiki, I thought you all should be informed of its existence. Danger ^{High voltage!} 00:52, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that.

• "to mobilize and empower"

It's about the students, not the encyclopedia.

• "human-knowledge generators"

WP:OR is now WP:OK

• "Students represent one of the most promising group from which to recruit new editors."

We have learned nothing from IEP #1

• "a reasonably high identification with the community's values and endeavors."

We have really learned nothing from IEP #1

• "to recruit new editors."

Screw the rest of you. You'll put up with anything, and keep coming back for more. Everything is to revolve around that graph of new editor registrations. Editor retention is nothing, nor is encyclopedia quality.

Andy Dingley (talk) 02:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I think it's rather illuminating to look at the presentations that have been prepared for students. There's a lot more emphasis on familiarising students with Wikipedia's editing interface than there is on educating them about the sort of content that students are supposed to add. On the first presentation is a brief summary of the five pillars, but the fifth pillar is stated as "Wikipedia does not have firm rules besides the 5 general principles stated here", implying that students will be fine as long as they write neutrally, behave politely and (possibly) don't plagarise. The third presentation is focused on policies, and students are introduced to NPOV, "plagiarism" (even though most of what the presentation is talking about is copyright violation) and referencing (much of which tells students how to add references rather than whether they should do so). That's it. In particular there's no mention of original research or notability and no discussion of which areas might be appropriate for students to add content. To make matters worse students will be left with the impression that Wikipedia doesn't have any rules beyond the handful of very vague principles in the presentation and since whoever wrote the presentation doesn't understand the difference between copyright and plagiarism students might get the idea that it's OK to copy text as long as they acknowledge the source. Hut 8.5 10:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I still don't know what the main goal of IEP is, and whether this is even compatible with the project scope. "Bringing in new editors" is in-line, even though clearly somewhat difficult to achieve well. "Giving students some editing to do, purely as an exercise in coursework" might offer benefits to colleges and even students, but it is not something that offers anything to the encyclopedia project. My concern with the IEP, from the vague pronouncements there have been, has always been that its main goal is closer to the second and that the encyclopedia was being ignored. I'm not here to be a volunteer teaching assistant. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:37, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Students as editors? Now it's students as administrators!

From User:Jaobar, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University

• Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_82#Learn_to_be_a_Wikipedia_Administrator_-_New_class_at_MSU
• User_talk:David_Gerard#MSU_Interview

No doubt well meaning, but how are the students going to react if they find they don't become admins at the end? Or even worse, if they're thrown to the wolves of RfA?! Andy Dingley (talk) 19:40, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't appear to me that the point of this class is actually becoming an administrator, but--rather--learning how Wikipedia is administered. I don't think I see any problem here. Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:04, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Hm. On the one hand, it sounds like Jaobar is aware that he isn't going to be able to take his students from zero to admin in one semester, and intends to focus more on the "this is how it's been done" than the "you must do this". On the other, it does sound rather like he expects to have them ticking all the boxes "required" for adminship and then opening RFAs, and I think he and the students will both have a rude awakening when they find that the community frowns on box-ticking, especially for editors with little experience otherwise who are visibly "aiming" for adminship.

There is some really interesting research work to be done here, about how people become admins, and how the process varies over time and between interest areas (and in fact, when I agreed to be interviewed for this class, that was what I thought it was about), but I think that would be best done when disconnected from "...and then we'll make you an admin, too!" Quite possibly it's too late now to change the course syllabus so substantially, though, and as long as Jaobar is prepared to stay engaged, really engaged, with both Wikipedia and his students and is truthful with them about the likelihood of the class actually resulting in adminship (and is willing to modify the syllabus on a dime if the current plan becomes clearly unworkable, intolerable to the community, or detrimental to the students), I'm willing to wait and watch with the hope that this will work out. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:07, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Please discuss this at Wikipedia_talk:United_States_Education_Program -- it is not remotely related to the India Education Program, and the U.S. program participants will not be following a discussion that happens on the India program talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Editors with past experience of the IEP car-crash are precisely those who need to be fore-warned in case this should turn out equally badly. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:38, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Prof. Obar has been working closely with Maggie and myself to be sure that expectations are accurately set. In addition, his students are doing extensive interviews of existing admins. I don't think we need to worry about that aspect of it. If you have further questions, please feel free to email me. :) Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 22:00, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

I have no problem with leaving messages on this page directing conversation to the US page, as editors involved in the IEP program likely have this page on watchlists more than the US program page. I just want to make it clear that if you would like anyone involved in that class or the U.S. program as a whole to read your comments or answer your questions, you should make those comments and questions on the talk page for that program. I personally find it really useful to have comments like the three you've posted here to see the varying reactions to the program, and I think the U.S. participants will too, so I hope you are willing to post your comments in a place where the U.S. program participants will see them as well! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me that editors would find it beneficial to have a central forum on en.wp to discuss the education programs generally, to develop a coherent overview rather than engage in piecemeal analysis. The education programs seem to disproportionately affect the English Wikipedia community, and yet Wikipedia:Global Education Program is a redirect and its talkpage a redlink. I understand the rationale for having much of the documentation on the outreach wiki, but it's not optimal for an initiative so heavily reliant on local community engagement and participation. Regards, Skomorokh 22:09, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but the local engagement is by program. Obviously, the India, Canada, and United States programs share a language, but we also have programs starting on the Arabic Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia starting this spring, and it's unfair to ask them to talk about concerns that stretch program-wide on the English Wikipedia. Instead, we are engaging with the local communities on the Arabic Wikipedia about the Cairo Pilot and the Portuguese Wikipedia about the Brazil Pilot. That's why we welcome any program-wide comments at outreach:Wikipedia Education Program. Otherwise, in a case like this where it is a comment about one class in one geographic region, please direct the comments to that region's talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 9 February 2012 (UTC)