User:DexDor/Effects of IEP on Wikipedia

Between August and December 2011 students in India added large amounts of poor-quality content to the English-language Wikipedia.

In most cases the new content was copyright violation, duplicated information already in wikipedia, incorrect (due to lack of understanding of the subject), incoherent (due to lack of fluent English) and/or not formatted correctly for Wikipedia.

Background
The India Education Program involved over 800 students at colleges in the Indian city of Pune.

Articles
Some of the articles affected are listed at India Education Program/Students.

The types of articles affected included:
 * New articles
 * Existing articles
 * Existing redirects
 * Existing disambiguation pages

Copyright violations
Many (most?) of the students commited copyright violations.

Students
According to one of the Campus Ambassadors (CAs) there were 843 students. The students can be categorised as:
 * Those in Category:Wikipedians in the India Education Program (as of 2011/10/09 there were 234 in the category - not necessarily all students)
 * Those with WP accounts that were not in the category
 * Those not using WP:EN accounts (i.e. IP editors)

One CA has said that there are just 5 CAs, but others put the value at 40. Some of them CAs didn't have much Wikipedia experience (or understanding of WP:COPYVIO). Some of the CAs did try to control things.

The response
Some of the edits made by IEP students were quickly reverted by those who had the affected articles on their watchlists, other editors (including IP editors) and ClueBot. New page patrollers tagged and deleted articles. Some wikipedians investigated other edits made by the students. Some wikipedians put considerable effort into explaining to students why their edits have been reverted.

WMF staff said they were taking it "very seriously", held meetings and thanked volunteer editors for their work clearing up the mess. However, they were unable or unwilling to shut the IEP down.

Quotes from talk pages
Some of these have been edited for brevity - see the linked diffs for the full info.

Effect on Wikimedia Commons
The IEP also resulted in many images being added to Wikimedia Commons, however almost all were either copyright violations (e.g. scanned from a textbook) or extremely poor quality.