Salut Mathias,

Thank you for sharing your vision of such a project and taking the time to collect information about it.

I've added a description of the Wikimini encyclopedia. Here is a copy:

Wikimini.org (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0): currently in French*, started in October 2008, 10180 articles in April 2013, anonymous contributions not allowed**

 

* is working on new language versions

** collecting and publishing the IP addresses of participating schools and children (without parental permission) has been considered a problem by the people who designed the project

 

As it is the case in the two projects described above (Wikikids.nl and ZUM-Grundschulwiki), Wikimini is an online encyclopedia where almost all of the content is being written by children and teenagers (~8 to 15 years old in the case of Wikimini). 10-15% of its articles are being created or developed in the context of class/school projects (see an original example covered by the press here (in French)), while the rest is being edited by other contributors outside any formal teaching context (see one of their young contributors interviewed at home by the national FrenchTV). Adults are welcomed to participate and have a dedicated portal. Basically they can be seen as "helpers". They help in: organizing the content; following the recent changes; checking and proof-reading the articles; making text understandable when it is not; adding pictures and videos; providing encouragement and advices to new contributors; etc. (More details here (in French)). It should be noted that moderation and administration tasks are shared between both adults and children. Ultimately, the children remain the main actors and builders of the project and their contributions are not overwhelmed by massive adult inputs. This is a central scope of Wikimini and probably one of the most important factors regarding its success and the large-scale participation of children of all abilities (not only those excelling at school and with a high self-esteem).

 

The conceptual design of Wikimini began in Switzerland in 2008, within a small group of primary education teachers and students in educational sciences from the universities of Fribourg (CH) and Mons (BE). Actually, the initial aim was not to bring the project into reality, but only to imagine a successful way of building such a wiki. Laurent Jauquier, a Swiss teacher currently living in Brazil, and who was at the origin of the idea, took the lead and decided to transform it into reality. He launched Wikimini in French in October 2008. The project has been growing fast ever since and has received a warm welcome from children, educational and media professionals around the French-speaking parts of the world. In 2011 it has even been invited, nominated and finally awarded as the “Best French site / content for children” in a contest organized by the European Commission (more info here). More recently, Wikimini has received the financial support from Wikimedia CH to improve its technical infrastructure, develop a common repository of shared media files suitable for children (something like ''Commons''), implement the technical requirements to support the development of other language versions and finally relieve the (non-technician) founder of the most highly technical workloads.

 

It has been expressed on different occasions that Wikimini wants to collaborate/exchange with similar wikis and that motivated persons would be welcomed to coordinate and represent new versions of Wikimini in their own language.


Please feel free to contact me to discuss more about this.

Kind regards

Laurent
http://wikimini.org


2013/4/6 Everton Zanella Alvarenga <tom@wikimedia.org>
Hi, Mathias.

I've sent your e-mail to the Brazilian volunteers. If someone if
interested, I hope they will contact you.

Tom

On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Mathias Damour
<mathias.damour@laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Hi, I have updated and better again the proposal:
>  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids
> It refers in particular to the 2010 /Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content/.
>
> I added : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids/Review_of_current_existing_wikis_akin_to_Wikikids
> and I may write a /*Wikikids/Questions and answers <http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikikids/Questions_and_answers&action=edit&redlink=1>*/ to anserw the questions and concerns this proposal can raise.
>
> One next step it certainly to draw up a project plan/potential schedule/roadmap for a migration to WMF hosting and for the first months... And to have your remarks on the proposal !


--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing."

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