2008/9/8 joseph seddon <life_is_bitter_sweet(a)hotmail.co.uk>uk>: It's based on the English National Curriculum, so certainly. The point is, SOS Children put this together as an encyclopedia specifically for their *own* schools in poor countries. They're not just doing something they think might somewhat fit the idea, they're actually using it as a real encyclopedia. - d.

2008/9/8 joseph seddon <life_is_bitter_sweet(a)hotmail.co.uk>uk>: Certainly in publicity and lending the good name of Wikimedia locally. - d.

2008/9/8 joseph seddon <life_is_bitter_sweet(a)hotmail.co.uk>uk>: If there's something they need WMUK can do! It's largely worked on by the Wikipedia 1.0 wikiproject on en:wp. - d.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I didn't even know this project existed! As a schoolteacher myself, i really should get involved. Theresa -- http://theresaknott.googlepages.com/home http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Theresa_knott

2008/9/8 joseph seddon <life_is_bitter_sweet(a)hotmail.co.uk>uk>: Absolutely. A lot of schools have very restricted internet access and block pretty much every site under the sun, sometimes including Wikipedia (or so I'm led to believe, the schools in my local area don't have it blocked, but I'm told others do), so being able to hand out an offline version to such schools would be very handy.

I would imagine that most kids in school would only get a small amount of time to edit wikipedia in school. I gather most kids who edit, edit from home. I think in terms of children's learning it would be advantageous to them. It may even get more kids involved in wikipedia in their later schooling years. I think that it would be easy to tailor articles for GCSE student's. Seen as GCSE's arnt exactly the most complex thing. I would say that the net gain by helping these kids, would outweigh any loos in editing time they would get from wiki. Also I do not think that it would result in too many further blockings. We could get in touch the education authorities of each county and discuss with them directly. Perhaps even specifically targeting those that block wikipedia. That would be the best damage limitation approach and increase the net gain from this. _________________________________________________________________ Discover Bird's Eye View now with Multimap from Live Search http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354026/direct/01/

Okay, David, I have joined this mail list. Thank you for the invitation. For background, the 2007 Schools Wikipedia is a big success: it was distributed via (amongst others) the "hole in the wall" project for rural Indian kids, the Shuttleworth fundation to South Africa Schools, SOS Children offices in India, Pakistan and Southern Africa, various local Wikipedians who burned copies for local schools and its listed all over the place (e.g. local and state gov sites etc). It even had distributers in Australia and New Zealand. We given thousands of free downloads (we have moved this to Amazon's download service), and mailed just under two thousand DVDs on request to all over the world. Schools are running it on intranets and even running mirrors on school websites (google for "2007 schools wikipedia selection"). We do not have an accurate user count but are fairly confident it is well over a million users. Even the online copy (which wasn't really the point) is rapidly moving up Alexa and will soon be the leading "checked content from Wikipedia online" site. Offline that's been us for quite a while. The 2008/9 version will be available for general view for final checks next week and for download and DVD two weeks after this. The article list has gone up to 5400 articles with about 2000 added and 600 removed from the 2007 version as more relevant articles for kids have reached adequate quality thresholds. Pretty much all of them have been updated to more recent versions since the 2007 version. They will still be sorted by curriculum topics with some portal pages for curriculum subjects added. Still this will be free by any route. We might skip "Torrent" which wasn't a great success. That do for now? Andrew On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:55 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Thomas, I am sure that WM UK could help. Please excuse my stupidity and give me a little while to work out exactly who is on WM UK before I suggest more. Clearly, any kind of contacts with technical or schools journalists would be good: we will send out review copies (probably on USB drives). WMF are supporting the launch with quotes etc. Andrew On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, September 9, 2008 16:07, Thomas Dalton wrote: Actually, it is something that we *already* do, and have done successfully for a long time. sfaiaa both David and I get daily calls and emails from the press and respond in a timely manner to them and continue to do so. (We also get an absolute ton of spam which, once a newer WMUK is actually running I will be *very* happy to direct to someone else!) A 'WMUK' currently exists, but the people who have done the work over the past 2½+ years (and who actively welcomed questions and comment rather than saying <quote>"You have no right to demand anything of the volunteers doing the hard graft in getting this set up. We accept and welcome the involvement of anyone that is interested, but it is your responsibility to get involved."</quote>) have realised that a new team without the history closely associated with their efforts is now required. Regards Alison

It might be worth just getting a seperate PAYG sim and a cheapy fone. _________________________________________________________________ Get all your favourite content with the slick new MSN Toolbar - FREE http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354027/direct/01/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 David Gerard wrote: David is a highly active member of Comcom in his own right, and regularly corresponds on behalf of the foundation as well... - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://donate.wikimedia.org Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Phone: 415.839.6885 x 601 Fax: 415.882.0495 E-Mail: cary(a)wikimedia.org

2008/9/9 Cary Bass &lt;cary(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>: "What's your title?" "*Volunteer* UK media contact." They always leave that bit out ... but I haven't grievously embarrassed the Foundation in three or four years, so I expect I'll keep the job ;-) - d.

At 18:10 +0100 9/9/08, David Gerard wrote: David, Please keep up the good work. I would miss your dulcet tones on Radio 4... Gordo -- "Think Feynman"///////// http://pobox.com/~gordo/ gordon.joly(a)pobox.com///

Andrew Cates wrote: Andrew, I think my mail went to the list before you arrived so I'll mention a few potential points for collaboration here (sorry to duplicate for everyone else). I'll let someone else tell you about WM UK, I'm very new here. With respect to "contacts with technical or schools journalists". I'm not a journalist (although I have a small number of connections in that area and have already forwarded your mail to a couple that may be interested). Instead I would like to highlight a few of my day job activities as they are relevant to the WIkimedia Schools project and, potentially, to WM-UK. Here in the UK there is an new project funded by BECTA [1] to collate materials relating to open source for UK Schools (not open content, but I think the overlap is strong enough in this case). The project is callend Schools Open Source Project and is only a couple of months old. They do not have a public site yet. I'm a member of their advisory committee and would be happy to make them aware of your work at the next meeting (Oct 9th). I'm thinking they would be an excellent vehicle to raise awareness of your work in UK schools. I'm also the service manage of OSS Watch [2], a JISC [3] funded national advisory service to UK Higher and Further Education sector. Most of our activites are related to IPR management and open source project sustainability. However, I think we would be able to spin the open source angle of your work to make it suitable for our audience (we already carry a case study on MediaWiki so it would be a good complement to that). I doubt HE would be very intested in your work, but I'm pretty sure some of the FE colleges would be. OSS Watch would be really happy to commission an article about your project (and any other similar work using open source software). If you are interested please contact us via info(a)oss-watch.ac.uk mentioning that I suggested you contact our content editor to discuss our requirements and payment schedule (you can copy some of this email of course). NB others with good writing skills and an idea for a case study are welcome to propose it to info(a)oss-watch.ac.uk (perhaps someone would like to do something as a fund raiser for set-up costs of WM-UK). Furthermore, we are always looking for decent giveaways for conferences and the like. Would you be in the position to sell us a number of the USB keys pre-loaded with the 2008 version? Finally, do you have any case studies or similar materials that you use to promote your work? We'd be very happy to carry them on our website. If we may be able to do to help in some other way please feel free to contact us via info(a)oss-watch.ac.uk. Of course, I'm hanging around here until I figure out if we can help WM UK too, so I'll be watching any plans that emerge here. Ross [1] http://www.becta.org.uk/ [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk [3] http://www.jisc.ac.uk