At 08:41 PM 9/23/02 +1000, you wrote:
I think a 'children's wikipedia' is an
EXCELLENT idea, but it would have
to be much more closely monitored and supervised than the general one,
which would probably remove it from the 'wikipedia' spectrum entirely.
You can't create an online project for kids and not supervise it for
appropriate content. Nobody would use it.
Something like this would really be a project for schools... I could
imagine kids researching topics and creating articles as part of their
general studies or computer literacy classes, and then uploading them as
part of their class work. But rather than having each individual child
have a login you'd want to set it up so that the TEACHER was the one
registered... and most primary/elementary school teachers really think
they've got too much on their plates already to do something like that.
They're either not computer-literate enough themselves, or not
interested, or too busy... so I doubt that the project would be
convincingly taken up.
The "report" was always a staple of my lower level schoolwork, usually
pieced together from encyclopedia articles. A kid's wikipedia is a natural
for English classes, even the editing. This idea might have a lot more
traction and popularity with teachers then we might think.
We just need a charter school that takes it up as its project. Although it
wouldn't have to be a school, it could even be a project of a teachers'
union or a state department of education.
Fred