[ComProj] [Fwd: SOS Children UK and the Wikimedia Foundation announce the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools]

[Jay A. Walsh]

Hey all - if anyone's got a chance today, could this be posted to the foundation wiki in 
the beautiful previous formats that have been established? :)

Thanks!


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SOS Children UK and the Wikimedia Foundation announce the 2008/9	Wikipedia 
Selection for Schools
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:26:57 -0700
From: Jay A. Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: jwalsh at wikimedia.org
Organization: Wikimedia Organization
To: press-release at lists.wikimedia.org

SOS Children UK and the Wikimedia Foundation announce the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for
Schools

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom & SAN FRANCISCO CA - October 22: SOS Children UK, in
coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, has released a complete 2008/9 revision of the
Wikipedia Selection for Schools, which is perhaps the most successful "checked content"
project derived from the English Wikipedia. Previous revisions have been distributed
off-line widely across the globe including by the Shuttleworth Foundation to South Africa
Schools, by the Hole in the Wall project to rural Indian children and through SOS offices
worldwide. The updated selection has the content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia - with
34,500 pictures, 20 million words and articles on more than 5500 topics. This revision,
which can be freely downloaded or collected free from SOS Children is selected and
organised around the UK National Curriculum and aimed at 8-17 year olds who broadly follow
the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere in the world.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, remarked:

"The Wikimedia Foundation is delighted to work with SOS Children. Our goal is to make
Wikipedia accessible to as many people as possible around the world, and SOS Children is a
great partner who helps us make that happen. Wikipedia content is released under a free
content license so that individuals and institutions can easily adapt, reuse and customize
its content: we encourage others, like SOS Children, to do exactly that."

Dr Andrew Cates, CEO of SOS Children (and also a Wikipedia administrator) said:

"Wikipedia is an incredible phenomenon, and we are proud to have helped improve the
accessibility of Wikipedia content to include users requiring remote access,
child-friendly access and checked access. This year, general quality improvements on the
English Wikipedia (particularly on requiring reliable sourcing for material) means the
single most important selection criterion is now relevance or interest to children and
manual content checking is slowly becoming secondary."

This selection which was originally designed for remote developing world schools without
internet access, has been widely put on first world school intranets and websites.
Although it is mainly an off-line project, even the online browsable copy at
http://schools-wikipedia.org gets on average well over ten thousand human surfers a day.
Around 15% of last year's article selection has been removed as no longer meeting rising
relevancy standards and more than fifteen hundred more relevant topics have been added, as
now of high quality. All articles were reviewed and updated as needed.

SOS Children's Villages is best known as the world's largest orphan charity (UK Charity
No. 1069204) but is also a very large educational charity running 192 schools with 91,000
pupils in the developing world. See www.soschildren.org

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit, 501(c)3 charitable foundation that operates
Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. The Foundation was established by Jimmy Wales
in 2003, two years after creating Wikipedia, to build a long-term future for free
knowledge projects on the internet. The Foundation, now based in San Francisco,
California, maintains the technical infrastructure, software, and servers that allow
millions of people every day to freely use Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Summary points:

     * The selection is organised around National Curriculum subjects
     * The articles have been cleaned up and checked for suitability for and usefulness to
children
     * Website: http://schools-wikipedia.org/
     * Download: a full download of the content should be available via BitTorrent by 23rd
October. It is current being seeded.

Contact:

     * David Gerard, UK media contact, Wikimedia Foundation:
       wp[at]davidgerard[dot]co[dot]uk, +44 7733 223584

     * Andrew Cates, CEO, SOS Children UK:
       andrew[at]soschildren[dot]org, +44 1223 365589

     * Elizabeth Rodgers, Press Officer, SOS Children UK:
       elizabeth[at]soschildren[dot]org, +44 1223 365589

-30-

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-- 
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Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609