Andrew,
The best wikijunior books are lovely, and should be much more widely
read... perhaps even included in digital catalogs sent to teachers making
choices for their schools. It's surprising how much of the book-finding
ecology is based on the premise that all books are sold and promoted by a
publisher.
And there is good material from other projects that is suitable for kids,
just not packaged in the wikijunior format; some of the better-edited
series on simple-en, some of the media collections on commons and flickr,
some of the early work on wikiversity and wikieducator.
Perhaps 'Wikijunior' could become an outlet for free works from many
projects, not just wikibooks, that have reached a certain stage of
completion.
On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
We're trying to do more advertising for
wikijunior, but there is a
limited amount that we can do locally. We've included large links to
wikijunior on our main page, a link in the side bar, and we post
featured wikijunior books on the main page as well. None of these
changes appear to be having the dramatic effect that we are hoping for.
Some ideas:
* Get open education bloggers to link directly to wikijunior for a week.
* Have an explicit set of crossproject links between wikijunior,
wikiversity, and wikieducator, similar to the sisterproject links on
wikipedia et al.
* Work more closely with the wikikids groups (french and dutch are almost
at 3000 articles now), which are communities that might also want to read
and contribute to wikijunior texts.
* Define how wikijunior could work with wikiversity & wikieducator, and
get some promotion from the Commonwealth of Learning in their supported
languages
* Get some formal connection with / support from ccLearn, and ask for
help promoting the project
1) I've started a new logo selection process for
Wikijunior at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikijunior/Logo. Wikijunior has never had
an official logo, although there have been some efforts to select one in
the past.
Nice. I recall some work to select a mascot as well, sometime back...
(zanimum, call your office).
2) The idea has been discussed before (although I
cannot remember where)
of turning
www.wikijunior.org (which currently redirects to
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior) into a read-only host for completed
wikijunior books. Books which pass muster could be uploaded to that
website for read-only access. The site would likely need to have a
highly-simplified interface designed for use by children. What kind of
effort would this take? Would we need a regular MediaWiki installation
for this, or could we get away with something smaller and simpler?
Better yet, you could make it read-and-tunnelled-write : a 'static' site,
but with edit links that take you to the page on the feeder site that lets
you edit the latest non-static version... Perhaps the group that works on
the stable german-wikipedia DVDs or wikipedia 1.0 can comment on ways they
use to allow editing and review of a static snapshot while maintaining
links to the original.
There are some ideas for a pared-down mediawiki interface that could
probably be implemented as a skin, but something simpler might work as
well - html plus clear links to 'how to comment on this book' and 'how to
contribute media or writing for this book' [a single interface for doing
this, regardless of the site where the book is being maintained]
3) Start considering the idea of physical publication
and distribution.
This had been brought up before, but was delayed and never brought up
again. Barring physical publication, we could try to get completed
wikijunior books included into projects like OLPC which are targeted at
children.
For physical publication, I hear Bob Young @ Lulu is a fan of wikipedia;
perhaps Lulu could host a section for print-on-demand wikijunior books and
help draw a bit more attention to them.
On the OLPC side of things, I am working on collections to ship with the
machines; we can include a 'wikijunior' section, say a selection of html +
edit/contribute links as above, once that exists. English and Spanish
and Portuguese collections would get immediate use; and feedback, if the
mechanism for that is simple enough.
English Wikibooks (I cannot speak for other language
projects) is very
lenient when it comes to Wikijunior books, and we would allow many
"cutesy" types of books for children that might otherwise be considered
policy violations. We understand that a child's book can still be
instructional even if it doesnt look like a regular textbook.
That's good to know. This may be worth discussing with other languages.
There are a lot of simple and delightful books one can make with the
collection of free imagery of the sky, the planet, and the human body;
some of the simplest could be language neutral, save the title and
metadata.
Best,
SJ
--
+1 617 529 4266 skype: metasj sj(a)laptop.org
one laptop per child
wiki.laptop.org