Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-01-30/News and notes

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"A lack of due dilligence by the Wikimedia Foundation"? How surprising! Hopefully all the donations they collected this year will help buy them some due dilligence over all their projects. Cla68 (talk) 07:04, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

It's somewhat ironic that an initiative that partly aimed to help address problems with western-focused editing didn't take into account the academic culture of the editors who were recruited - though I do find it amazing and horrifying that Indian university students are apparently allowed to include plagiarised material in assessment items. It's good that there's been such a frank assessment of this though. Nick-D (talk) 11:09, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

• I believe the figure of 2000 students recruited (See Verdict delivered on the India Education Program above) is inaccurate. According to Tory Read's report and the quantitative analysis report, there were 1,014 students registered for the IEP of whom 665 (66%) actually made edits. Nevertheless, an absurd number for a "pilot" involving completely inexperienced participants, starting with the paid consultants who were running the program.Voceditenore (talk) 16:49, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
  • You're quite right, that figure survived from an early draft; I've corrected the error and will bring it to the attention of the editor responsible. Skomorokh 17:13, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

• Strange, the blog post said that "The program has not been oriented toward creating new Wikipedians, but has added almost 2,000 editors during the Fall 2011 semester, more than thrice the number from Spring 2011 (500+)." ResMar 21:02, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

• "The program" there is a reference to the Global Education Program rather than just the Indian one I believe. Skomorokh 21:25, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

• Actually, the 665 students refers to mainspace edits. A significant fraction of the remaining students had userspace edits, some of which contained copyvios. MER-C 01:08, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

• It is not just India that has had problems with plagiarism. See here for a analysis of a Canadian effort [1] dealing with a class of 1700 students Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:02, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Although that class had 1500 students, only 317 students created a user account. Of those, only half went on to edit Wikipedia articles—158 students. The more discursive analysis, User:Colin/A large scale student assignment – what could possibly go wrong?, makes very interesting reading. Voceditenore (talk) 17:15, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Funny how nobody contacted me when I can offer help at a moment's notice since I'm on campus anyway. And the campus ambassadors are a joke (including one who's my high school friend). You assigned 4 ambassadors and none of them have more than 50 edits? Is WMF so desperate that they'll accept ambassadors with close to no experience? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:37, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

• Has anything been learned from the India and Canada experiences? See: IEP/Welcome Mathew Townsend (talk) 01:42, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

  No, despite the efforts of many of us (spearheaded by Kudpung); their inability to recognize and acknowledge what went wrong is extraordinarily frustrating. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい)

• I have reasons to believe that the described observations have nothing to do with how well or poorly the experiment was designed or conducted. From my accidental experience with relatively obscure articles related to India culture and geography and adited by Indians well before this experiment I had an impression that a considerable number Indian editors from India disregard all wikipedia rules about referencing. They just dump something either out of their head or from some Indian websites. A typical, randomply picked examples are Chaturvedi, Tiwari, Pathak. I bet the same will be for any page randomly picked from Category:Indian family names... Here...: "Ghatorhe". Try picking yourself now. Loggerjack (talk) 03:58, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Run a search for "...is a beautiful village"; more than half of them are Indian/Pakistani villages. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 14:30, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

nice catch! Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

• Getting away from India, isn't there a paradox that the two main efforts of the WMF at the moment - more mobile uses and more editors - are likely to be pulling in different directions. Presumably people are much less likely to edit from a mobile? Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Besides the occasional wikiholic on a smartphone, you mean. ResMar 22:59, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

There's been some effort to create better support for editing Wikipedia on smart phones. But if we can establish good means of turning readers into editors (which some of the new editor programs are aimed to do, although some of the new editor programs seem to be aiming to attract people who don't necessarily read Wikipedia), then getting mobile readers means when the person does sit down to a computer, then they will edit. Jztinfinity (talk) 17:56, 5 February 2012 (UTC)