[Foundation-l] Wikijunior

[Samuel Klein]

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 at laptop.org
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