Nice to see this thread. I've been thinking about Vikidia recenntly.
And Mathias, while I've said it elsewhere, I am glad that you have recently been updating that proposal page on Meta. It is a natural candidate to be a sister project - and at least to get some cross-project publicity (which can help build a project's contributor base, to make it easier for it to become one).
Regards, Sam.
On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Mathias Damour mathias.damour@laposte.net wrote:
Le 04/02/2013 00:53, Lila Pagola a écrit :
Vikidia is an equivalent of Wikipedia for 8 to 13 years old children. I've already sent a message about it more than a year ago. It exists in French, Spanish and Italian (and is about to be launched in Russian) whereas another group opened it in dutch : http://fr.vikidia.org/ ; http://es.vikidia.org/ ; http://it.vikidia.org/
I know Vikidia and I think is a very useful alternative for younger students... Once I did an experience in a primary school here in my city, Córdoba, and it worked well... Aroud 20 kids of fifth grade previously prepared a topic of their interest and they edited with our help (their teacher and me). But till I know, they didn't continue editing after the workshop...
We have some school working on fr.vikidia.org, and they mostly just do their topic and don't get involved on a permanent basis (with an exception, a class in which pupils seem to be free to create an article when they are ready or willing to all round the year... :-)
So we need a permanent community beyond those classroom projects to be involved in the wiki. We recently had a school that made their pupils write about 50 article that was dictionary-like entry, so we had to deal with it (deletion, redirect or expansion).
The problem I have found, not only in this case, so maybe it's a more general problem, it's how to share our commitment with other teachers.
In some cases, digital literacy of teachers is very basic for experimenting with Wikipedia. But in most of cases, I guess, the main issue is they don't know the free culture dynamics that Wikipedia embodies, and how participating of such a project from school could be a meaningful learning for their students.
Maybe someone in this list has a kind of "tip" about this... how to encourage teachers to appropriate themselves of the pedagogical possibilities of the projects.
That must be about the 1% rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29 As well as to be amenable to active learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning and to choose the wiki as a tool for it.
By the way what about existing chapter such as Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia España, México, Venezuela, Chile supporting and promoting es.vikidia ? Wikimédia France already does.
Anyway, people that would be willing to take in charge the promotion and, say, "community building" of es.vikidia are welcomed and could make a great work ! Since the wiki already exists, has some significant content, even a significant audience (40.000 unique visitors a month) and has living models/patterns in both fr.vikidia, wikikids.nl and es.wikipedia.
Open a wikikids/vikidia in English would be another thing... We could think about it as well, but we would have to think about simple English Wikipedia.
May you read (again ?) in spanish and french : Vikidia y la documentación (Las ideas de Freinet con nuevas herramientas) http://irisfernandez.com.ar/betaweblog/?p=1526
Salutations,
-- Mathias Damour 49 rue Carnot F-74000 Annecy 00 33 (0)4 57 09 10 56 00 33 (0)6 27 13 65 51 http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Astirmays mathias.damour@laposte.net
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