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(a)wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
Organization: Wikimedia Organization
To: press-release(a)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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--
---
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
Hey all - wondering if someone can help me prep for a talk I'm doing
on Saturday (it's for a panel about new media/pop culture, and impact
on the current US campaigns).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_palin
They've asked for some visual evidence of the very rapid evolution of
the Palin WP article. I was hoping someone might be able to dive into
the page history and pick 5-10 screen shots (adjusted for display on a
powerpoint/openoffice presentation ( :) ) size. PNG or jpgs are
fine. I was thinking one from the creation of the article, another
from t minus 2 weeks, day before the announcement (when alleged
insider info was added), one from a few minutes after McCain announced
the running mate, then four more that follow us over interest points
right up to the current shape of the page. I'd like to show the
change of the photo too (someone snapped her recently and updated tht)
Obviously doesn't have to show the whole page, just the top portion
with contents box collapsed.
Really appreciate your help if you can! Thanks
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
>From time to time I was asking people to fill the page [1], so we may
be able to make a bot for community news. I think now that better idea
is to make something like "Project:Community news" page (with
translation in all languages) at every project. However, this needs
asking every particular community. And I suppose that this is the part
of ComProj's job :)
I could make a bot which would be used by writing new section at the
Meta page by specific group of people (I suppose, again, by some
ComProj's members). The bot will check every hour is there any news
and is it written by particular user. If so, bot would resend that
message to all (specified) projects.
[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedian_pubs
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: [ComProj] New project, the Wikipedia Globe
To: Discussion list for the Communication Projects Group
<comproj(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: misza1313(a)gmail.com, millosh(a)gmail.com
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Cary Bass <cary(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> I've created a new page,
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/logo>, and would like to draw
> attention to it from people who have been active in the discussions as
> well as including anyone who may be interested via the local projects'
> village pumps.
>
> So, this is where Comproj comes in... getting the message out that we're
> looking for interest in this project. Thanks!
We might want to get some nice bot owner to spam a message to all the
village pumps[1] (but send it to only the Wikipedias), something along
the lines of [2] maybe?
CC'ing to two possible bot owners that could help, Misza13 because of
his MiszaBot and Millosh (this is similar to his "Hello world!"
project).
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> By the way,
> I'm interested in doing a roundtable interview episode for the podcast with several people elected to the committees of various of our different chapters - to discuss what issues every chapter is facing, and what is unique about each one.
Might want to ask someone to forward this message to internal-l
(chapters people are on there)[3].
[1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Internal/Dist…
[2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Logo/Notification
[3]https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/internal-l
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
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Hi all,
I need help getting the message out about a redesign of the Wikipedia
globe. We're going to be rendering the entire globe in 3-D, and we'd
like community input on which characters should be included on the
"hidden" pieces, as well as correcting the errors and inconsistencies in
the active logo.
I've created a new page,
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/logo>, and would like to draw
attention to it from people who have been active in the discussions as
well as including anyone who may be interested via the local projects'
village pumps.
So, this is where Comproj comes in... getting the message out that we're
looking for interest in this project. Thanks!
- --
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
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