Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Special report

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Single point of failure

• I'd like to echo Kudpung's concern that we need to get CorenSearchBot back up and running as soon as possible. We have many policies here at Wikipedia, but only a few have legal implications and copyright adherence is one of them. Please note that the bot is fine, it's the Yahoo search engine that CorenSearchBot used that is the problem. I know the WMF staff have been trying to work with search engine providers to come up with a solution, but it's been a few months and it might be time to put more effort in to finding a solution. This also highlights another issue, single point of failure. We rely heavily on bots here at Wikipedia and certain bots, like CorenSearchBot, are critical to our operation. When those bots go down, it can be a major problem. IMHO, we should be indentifying critical bots and making sure we have a backup plan to keep them operational. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 12:53, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Just a note: I think we're very close to having a solution to this problem. I think we'll be able to make some announcement around a week from now. Coren is involved in the resolution of this, and please know that it's being actively worked. Several staff members have put a great deal of time and energy into getting a resolution. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 13:52, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Copyright in India

Just an observation that Indian copyright law is based on UK law and the Berne convention, and is not substantially different to copyright law anywhere else on the planet. I cannot comment on whether or not there is a culture of plagiarism that is worse than in educational establishments in other places - if so, that would appear to be a structural issue that the Wikimedia Foundation cannot tackle. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 12:59, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

There's some discussion about that at the bottom of WT:IEP now, which would seem to indicate that there are some pretty serious issues with people's attitudes towards copyright in Asia (see there for full comments). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 15:30, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Basically, laws and attitudes are two different things. Take laws on jaywalking for example. There are laws, but most of the people don't follow them. Same concept here. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 16:40, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

The concept of plagiarism as a bad thing is quite modern. For example, ancient authors copied each other on a regular basis: what we know about the lost books of Polybius' Roman History is due to Livy's unattributed plagiarism of the earlier writer. Even as late as the 18th century, plagiarism was a regular occurrance: there is a comic incident where Benjamin Franklin, after falling out with his partner in the publishing business, then accused him of unethically printing articles from Chamber's Cyclopedia in their American newspaper -- despite the fact it was Franklin's idea in the first place! (Encyclopedia publishers in the 18th & 19th centuries plagiarized each other as a regular practice.) I believe one reason for this was that until the 19th century, a scholar considered himself very fortunate to have access to even as many books as can be found in the average high school library. Access to information & ideas is more important than giving proper credit for them; only within the last 100 years or so have we in the West achieved the luxury of abundant information, so now we expect honesty in credit. -- llywrch (talk) 17:32, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Some modern authors (H. P. Lovecraft comes readily to mind) have encouraged people to take their ideas as well, so it's not unheard of today, but it's certainly unusual. In Lovecraft's case, it's made the copyright status of his work irredeemably confused. Totally agree with your points, though. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:52, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Is it really useful to single out Indian student edits in this way? A much smaller, US-based initiative has had similar recent problems [1], [2]. Anyone that's worked in this area has seen copy-paste additions by editors whose user pages indicate all kinds of origins. See WP:CCI. Wouldn't it be better to just ask all course leaders to verify that they've given their students a session on plagiarism?

Another angle - some of the institutions sponsoring and/or requiring WP editing must have subscriptions to the plagiarism detector tool Turnitin. If the WP edits are done as part of an educational assignment it'd probably be acceptable from Turnitin's point of view to submit articles there for checking. Pending a re-instatement of in-house tools, which may or may not include Google books. Novickas (talk) 20:48, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I do think it is fair to single out India (and I have worked extensively with copyright problems in Wikipedia). Though editors from all over the world post copyvios, if you look at the list of investigations at WP:CCI, a disproportionate number are from South Asia. Calliopejen1 (talk) 03:21, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

I concur with Calliopejen1. I've been working in education in Southeast Asia (with periods in India) for the last 13 years, and plagiarism is endemic here - at all levels of academia. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:48, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Class size

From [3]:

Some of the classes enrolled for the program were very small, with only 18 students.

Smaller classes demand equal number of in-class presentations/editing sessions/refresher sessions as any bigger class would do. To get maximum impact, it makes logical sense to enroll classes with larger number of students.

Yikes. This sounds like anti-wisdom to learn from this project. I couldn't disagree more. Plagarism is a problem when mentors are not closely involved with student's work. Small class sizes and close prof / TA involvement is *vital* for getting good Wikipedia articles; lectures to the class are a dime a dozen and not that important. If the prof of an 18-person course was not familiar with Wikipedia or not monitoring their students at all, the solution is absolutely not to give them a 50-person course! If only a few profs had the knowledge / patience to do this right, then just shrink the program and keep with small class sizes. 800 students participating was part of the problem, anyway. 70 dedicated students across 3 Wikipedia-savvy professors would have done far more good than a giant haphazard program, I'm sure. If Wikipedia absolutely had to be part of a large class project... I'd still want to break it down into "labs" where a TA has a responsibility to chat with a specific set of 15-20 students, and check their work. The difference between "go to library, read refernece work on subject at hand, add passages cited to it, add new passages next week off different book from library, etc." and "sudden text dump with no referenecs" should be very obvious - IF people are paying attention early.

The other limitation on quality is that students should choose to do this at least semi-voluntarily. (I believe that the course description of Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem mentioned the Wikipedia aspect, for example.) I'm not closely familiar with the project, but did all 800 students really know what they were getting into? Or was this a surprise homework assignment dropped on all of them? SnowFire (talk) 16:48, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi SnowFire, thanks for the comment -- that page is actually an early draft of what is at meta:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program, and a few things have changed, including that particular point. Our learnings will continue to evolve on the Meta page, which is more accessible than a sandbox on the English Wikipedia. :) I'll replace the content of that page with a link to Meta momentarily. I think you have a great point, though, and I'd encourage you to make comments on the talk page of the Meta page to ensure we are having community feedback on those learning points in one place. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Get back on the horse

When you get bucked off a horse, you should get back on again as soon as you've checked out that you're still in one piece. Otherwise you're likely to start imagining difficulties and problems and how close you came to getting killed. Wikipedia is still in one piece. Similar projects should now go forward with all deliberate speed, or folks will be reluctant to get involved with this ever again.

Similar projects might include projects is other countries, say Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa. Project size should be limited, say to 100 students, until a fully successful project has been completed. I'd suggest not making the project mandatory for a grade, rather make student contributions "extra credit" assignments. Wikipedia has always been about volunteer contributors - there's no reason to change this now. Professors should review student contributions before they go into article space - that way we can know whether the problem is with the students or with the professors. Having the university administration apply for a Wikipedia grant to implement the program might help as well, by getting the top people at the university involved and putting their credibility and prestige on the line. Smallbones (talk) 17:54, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Well said. This project tried to do too much too quickly, but experimenting with partnering with universities world-wide is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing to broaden and diversify our contributor community, and now's the time to take the lessons from the initial pilot on-board and do better. :-) --Eloquence* 19:04, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Here's another idea; just have people edit their native language wiki instead of trying to get them to edit here. I've long advocated that we should be better, especially with Indian editors, at pointing them to their native language wikis, for many of the same reasons this project has gone awry (see the history of Malhoo for a great example of what happens when we encourage editors with very little command of English to edit en.wiki instead of their native language), and because increasing the size of the other Wikipedias will make us look more diverse and give us higher quality content everywhere, which can be translated into other languages and make better articles overall. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and many other Indian Wikipedias are in the low to mid 10,000s in articles, meaning they're missing a lot more than we are, and they could use the new editors more than us, not to mention the fact that the number of copyvios would probably go down because students won't feel the same pressure they do writing in a foreign language (as a Japanese student, I can relate to that pressure in some ways). I've met many Indian immigrants where I live, and most of them are great people with the best of intentions, but I would never mistake their speech or writing for Jawaharlal Nehru; there is a reason we have other language wikis, and we should make a more conscious effort to promote them. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 20:33, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

As far as I know, the India Edu folks have strongly promoted the existence of the Indic language Wikipedias. There's a staff person on the India team, Shiju Alex, entirely dedicated to supporting Indic language projects, and you can read a bit more about Indic language specific outreach here. In my department (engineering), we're investing significant time and effort in the development of technologies like Narayam and WebFonts, which help overcome technical barriers to participation in those languages.

As you know, the language situation in India is particularly complex. English is promoted as the lingua franca in higher ed, and it's an official language of India that's widely seen as key to professional success. At the same time, the Indic languages are also being promoted and pushed, sometimes for nationalistic reasons, or for reasons of cultural heritage. It's a very difficult context to wade into, and I think WMF is wise to generally avoid being prescriptive as to what language people should work in. My understanding -- and Nikita or Hisham would be able to add some detail on this -- is that the strong preference of the educational institutions approached in the India Edu pilot was to work in English.

I certainly do agree that we should define parameters for these programs that serve the best interests of our projects, regardless of the conditions and preferences on the ground, and decline engaging in activities that bring more harm than good.--Eloquence* 06:17, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

One of the reasons this project failed is a gross underestimation of the amount of work nearly 1000 novice editors (~5% of the existing body of editors) would push onto the community at large. I would be very wary of implementing these types of programs on a large scale without them being essentially self-contained–having enough supporting editors, ambassadors, and involved professors that they do not place a burden on already swamped NPPers, copyright investigators, and general cleanup crew. Danger ^{High voltage!} 22:28, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Scientific plagiarism in India

This article may be of interest. Curiously, it is now at AFD. *goes to investigate* --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 18:07, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

An Ambassador's 2 cents

As an "Online Ambassador" for students and classes in the Public Policy project and current US education initiative, I urge the Foundation to be very careful not to bite off more than it can chew. Starting with 800 students was just 'way too ambitious. Projects need to start small in each new market to see what the issues will be before expanding. A high ratio of ambassadors to students in smaller pilot projects is essential. Perhaps this is now stating the obvious. Happy editing, everyone. -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:35, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Even if it is stating the obvious, your point is well worth stating and re-stating. I was particularly concerned that so much responsibility, over-and-above what Campus Ambassadors are supposed to do, was placed on those bright, enthusiatic, but very inexperienced shoulders. This was compounded by bringing on a group of "special" Online Ambassadors (not chosen through the normal Online Ambassador processes) who were completely unqualified for the task. I hope too that when the IEP gets back on the horse, the organisers will reach out to the subject-specialised WikiProjects who could have provided an enormous amount of help and advice, but were never even contacted. Please don't ignore that valuable resource. Voceditenore (talk) 14:07, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Evaluating the Pilot

Just like to say that the WMF Global Development team is taking the feedback from all sources very seriously, as we review what happened during the pilot over the past few months. We made mistakes as Frank and Hisham shared above and we are already integrating the lessons into our plans going forward. I am in the process of retaining a reporter to do a round of interviews with key actors in the process the WP community, students, professors, campus and online ambassadors and WMF staff to really capture all of the learning systematically. Her report will be shared openly with the community and I've asked her to be blunt, where necessary. While we can't go back in time, we can extract lots of learning from the pilot that will make all of our work more effective. Our team definitely plans on getting back on the horse (appreciate the sentiments Smallbones) and we plan to follow Beckett's maxim as you suggest Skomorokh. --Bnewstead (talk) 00:54, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Ethics, anyone?

"Acting as a publisher of content" is a no-no. Forcing Indian kids to "contribute" is a priority. Very well. You wanted unfree labor (not exactly slavery, but not free will either), you've got unfree works (not always plagiarism, but mostly worthless). Unexpected, really?

Perhaps, if this "source" of content is really important for the Foundation, all input should be contained in an incubator or some other sort of a holding pen (and then kill them before they grow).

NVO (talk) 11:45, 10 November 2011 (UTC)