Wikipedia talk:One Encyclopedia Per Child

Some thoughts on this

If this is to be something that Wikimedia users can help put together in terms of a "standard distribution" that goes with the "One Laptop per Child" project, I'm all for it. The #1 cost for such an endeavor would be the content organization effort, which if done through Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects would be entirely volunteer labor anyway.

A small amount of effort would have to be done to organize the actual CD-ROM, but that would be a later step in the process. Once a single CD-ROM could be developed, the cost per CD would be trivial and that cost might even be supported by the laptop project itself.

Comment on the thought of a CD

A CD-ROM is only of use for distributing the OEPC to the teacher via bicycle or 'cleft stick', if the teacher does not have Web acccess. teletrafficresearcher 06:55, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

BTW, don't forget Wikijunior in this effort as well. This is content that is aimed specifically at school children (generally 8-12 year olds), and a likely target of the laptops as well.

As far as where to put the organizational coordination pages, that is something more likly to be up in the air and subject to discussion. From my viewpoint this is something that should be on Meta, as it can involve more than one language and project. Or something subsidary to the Wikipedia 1.0 projects. --Robert Horning 16:34, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Recall from the project page that a CD-ROM couldn't be read by the $100 laptop. Perhaps a USB thumb drive with ROM instead of NAND flash memory would work, though: you could print two or three of them in a smart card format, scored to snap out into devices like this one.--Joel 16:53, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Language

This is for sure an interesting idea. But why in English? There aren't much poor countries where English is the first language for school children. Most English speaking countries are rich. Why should poor children in Brazil need a simple English encyclopedia? They need Portuguese content. Don't encourage the cultural dominance of single languages or cultures. --::Slomox:: >< 02:47, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Speaking of cultural dominance...I think many of the poor in Brazil don't speak Portuguese as a first language. As colonial languages go, Portuguese will help them more within their country, but English might be helpful if they want to be more involved online or in the international academic community. Hopefully, the OLPC project will give them a chance to make Wikipedias in their own local languages eventually.--Joel 00:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

"I think many of the poor in Brazil don't speak Portuguese as a first language". I see you know nothing about Brazil, at least about its people or culture. I agree with Slomox. -- Aflm 19:24, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Hehehe! Joel, are you kidding? I agree with Slomox too. FML ^{hi me at pt} 07:52, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Joel's statement is, simply... What??? LOL!... Manuel Anastácio 18:47, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Joel, se não me engano, é o nome do pai (ou do próprio) 'Superman' (ou algo parecido?). Bem... sua observação acerca do Brasil é digna de um extra-terrestre e só por isso me veio à cabeça o personagem. Eu já vi absurdos, como identificar Buenos Aires como capital do Brasil e coisas parecidas. Mas o Joel, para mim, bateu todos os recordes e deveria ir para o Guiness: "I think many of the poor in Brazil don't speak Portuguese as a first language"! E ele ainda está falando dos pobres! Inacreditável. 200.185.240.5 07:13, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

No, people, don't panic. He's not serious. He's just making a joke... aren't you? Indech 19:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

English because all of the content is already there in the English wikipedia, often with article assessments and a list of core topics. it just needs to be made 'kid-friendly'; with 300,000 articles, Portuguese probably has almost all of the content needed to start the culling process, but most of the teams committed to selecting out articles for either offline or children are working solely in English. A good project for speakers of other languages might be to start with a list of core topics translated from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics, then get a team together. -dialectric

Encyclopedia for Children in wiki

Hi there, I wonder if you've heard about the wikikids project proposal : an encyclopedia for children in wiki. Keep in mind that simple Wikipedia does only exist in english, and that Wikijunior is not an encyclopedia. There is a gap to fill. We thought that it would be interesting for children to be able not only to read but to edit an encyclopedia, just in the same way as we do on WP. I'am afraid that the existence of simple english Wikipedia doesnt' make it easy to open a new wiki in english dedicated to children, because it would be quite similar. Nevertheless I think that the aim to built an encyclopedia for 8 to 13 years old is fairly clearer than the justification of simple. And it can meet its other target in the same time aside (adults with learning difficulties...). Such a wiki was opened in dutch wikikids.nl and in french : http://fr.vikidia.org/ We keep in touch each other but both projects are independent (I am from the french one). It is quite successfull with 800 artcles in 8 month for the dutch one and as many in 2.5 month for the french one. I wish that it could become an international project. en.vikidia.org or es.vikidia.org and so on are available. Let me know what you think about it. Astirmays 23:03, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Where does this project fit in?

It seems that One Encyclopedia Per Child is chiefly concerned with producing a useful, readable, off-line, un-editable encyclopedia for students. I thought I would list some other projects which could be related to this one, to start a discussion of content-reuse. It seems there are projects for kids, and projects for offline, but no one multi-lingual, simple-language, offline-accessible project?

• 1. Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection, producing a useful, off-line, un-editable encyclopedia for students.
• 2. Simple english wikipedia, producing an encyclopedia using a soft-limit of 2000 commonly used english words, has 21k pages
• 3. moulinwiki.org, producing localized offline encyclopedias in french and arabic, among other languages.
• 4. vikidia france, mentioned above, specifically for 8-13 years, 2,700 articles, french and dutch

Starting from the 2007 CD Selection

I would suggest (1), the CD selection as a starting point for an english version. All the tags are already stripped and the articles have been preselected for children, though not edited into simpler English. I personally would take out either all the biographies, or at least all the bios of living people, which would leave around 600 megabytes of content. Next, I would add a functional search tool, since right now, there is just a letter-index and hyperlinks. Another minor issue is that the selection was made by a religious charity based in england, leaving some pro-christian and pro-england bias to be worked on.

Excuse me but SOS Children is not a Christian charity, it is non-professing. We bring children up in whatever their own local culture and faith is Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Islam, Jewish etc or secular. Do you think the government of Pakistan would have made a Christian charity custodian of all accompanied children after the earthquake? However UK bias in selection is an obvious issue. BTW if you give us a list of articles we can do the strip out for you. And if you can sort a search tool we would use it, but there is a speed issue running from disc and also a software issue you need to look at. I think you need a pre-indexed search really. We are here to help --BozMo talk 10:01, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Compression

If we are talking about having the encyclopedia actually on the computer, it would have to be compressed, since the OLPC only gives 1gb to work with. I don't know much about the mechanics of compression - the best text compression programs can do about 88% compression, the CD Selection has a number of images which may not have been fully optimized, and I imagine through removal of images and some clever compression the current size could probably be cut in half. Doing so and leaving the search intact would probably be nearly impossible.

Added Wikipedia For Schools on DVD/USB

I've added links to Wikipeida For Schools on DVD/USB project. Pls check. Nikhilsheth (talk) 14:02, 1 February 2011 (UTC)