Hi again and sorry for this late reply,

@Mathias:

Salut Mathias, thank you for your interest and your valuable inputs. I hope you don't mind me answering a few of the points you have made.

The funny thing is that I would say that Wikikids.nl is more similar to
Vikidia in its principles than to Wikimini !
One of its promoter wrote recently "The Dutch WikiKids has both
purposes: learn how to edit on a wiki and profide suitable information
for children. Both purposes are important, in my opinion."

This is the same on Wikimini. In any case all the contributors to Wikimini are doing their very best to support and enhance these two aspects. At the same time, Wikimini has from the very beginning put a particularly strong focus on children's participation because we have always seen more opportunities for them to learn by contributing rather than by simply reading.

(...) which is that children schould write for
children, and teenagers for teenagers.

On Wikimini, both children and teenagers (usually around 8 to 15 years old) develop the content. And they do it with the help of adults. We only *suggest* and encourage adults to concentrate more their efforts on areas in which children might need a little more help, and to use their best efforts to give added value to (in French I would have said "valoriser") the contributions made by children (see http://fr.wikimini.org/wiki/Aide:Adultes (in French)) for more information.

I made some statistics to compare these 3 wikis (Wikikids.nl, Wikimini
and Vikidia) and I will upload it soon. It appears among other things
that the average size of articles of Wikimini is 47% of the one of
Vikidia, wheras Wikikids.nl/Vikidia makes 59%.

Well, I think you agree that the size of an article doesn't represent a sign of quality, especially in an encyclopedia written for young readers. However I can honestly say that I would have expected Wikimini articles to be much shorter than they actually are, especially because of the age differences between these projects (and some other differences as well). Therefore this is a (positive) surprise for me, even if... you know what they say about statistics ...and bikinis :-) ! Anyway, thank you for taking the time to share your findings. The good conclusion is that we are all still works in progress that will only become better with time. Hopefully we may also find a way to better collaborate in the future.

À bientôt... peut-être ? (je serai en Europe du 12 juin au 30 juillet).


@Bastien:

Thank you for your kind words.

On this page, there is a confusion between « libre » and « libre de
droits »:
  http://fr.wikimini.org/wiki/Wikimini:R%C3%A8gles_d%27utilisation_des_images

Mhh... I'm not sure about this one. On this page, we try to explain (in very simple words!) what kind of images are allowed on Wikimini. Where is the confusion? "Free (content)" is a short way to say "Legally free (content)". Or maybe I'm missing something?

(...) I tried to view this image:
  http://stock.wikimini.org/wiki/File:Chat-3551.jpg?uselang=fr
and could not find copyright information.
When trying to check on flickr, flickr asks me to log in (??).

Thank you for reporting this. It looks like the author of this picture had moved the file from public to private. I have updated our Flickr templates to directly incorporate and show the required information.

Finally, a tiny UI glitch: C-<left-click> on an external link (like
a link to flickr) will ask the user to confirm she wants to leave
the page, while C-<left-click> will open the link in a new tab for
most browsers I know -- the confirmation is not needed.

Yes, this is a safety setting for children. However, I know that if you try to open the link in a new tab, the confirmation window won't appear. Unfortunately I don't know of any way to solve this. And at the same time, it is not very important. But if anyone has a solution please feel free to share!

Thank you again for your words of encouragement and constructive feedback. C'est vraiment très apprécié.

Laurent



2013/4/23 Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>
My point is:  If there are different sites (like wikimini and vikidia)
that expressly target different audiences, that's not necessarily a
sign of incompatibility.  I think it should be okay to have more than
one article on a given topic, in any wiki for kids, if the different
articles have significantly different language levels.

(There might be only a short set of ~1000 articles in an encyclopedia
for 3-6 year olds -- but certainly those articles would be different
than those written for 8-18 year olds!)

SJ

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Mathias Damour
<mathias.damour@laposte.net> wrote:
> Le 23/04/2013 04:30, Samuel Klein a écrit :
>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Mathias Damour
>> <mathias.damour@laposte.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Your proposal on this 2010 discussion, (
>>> http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Vikidia:Wikimini_et_Vikidia ) to which I
>>> anserwed
>>> by the one you mention, was that Vikida would switch its reader target to
>>> 13
>>> to 18 years old people, and cohabit in this manner with Wikimini which
>>> would
>>> be for 8-13 years old children.
>>>
>>> One of my arguments against that was that I disagree with the assumption
>>> that this proposal held, which is that children schould write for
>>> children,
>>> and teenagers for teenagers.
>>
>> I think "children" and "teenagers" are different audiences.
>
>
>  They are, still every single child may be a different audience...
>
>
>> Authors of any age can write for those two audiences.
>>
>> I could imagine having up to three versions of articles about any
>> topic: with complexity suitable for audiences of ages "6-12", "13-19",
>> "any".
>
>
> One may think about it.
> However, I think in regards to legibility and having a clear and mobilizing
> goal, it may not be productive.
> There is no working wikikids in some major languages. When they do exist,
> say in french, whereas some primary schools websites link Vikidia, many
> still rather link Wikipedia, which means it's hard to gather an audience
> even if we think we have the content that fits to it.
>
> Someone that is quite involved in the education innovation debate in France
> now use to tell about how he figure a resource that would be adapted to each
> individual. I didn't get easily what he means, may-be a Facebook-like system
> that would suggest you content that fits to your level of knowledge
> (automaticaly or by peer suggestion ?) It may be related to the concept of
> "zone of proximal development" (see on WP if you need ;-)).
> We had a talk and I guess the idea was to integrate Vikidia into this.
> However, I don't get it. Be it an automatic system that use Vikidia's
> content among others, that's fine. But when it comes to produce content, we
> have to worry about our own consistency first, in order to allow the users
> to work in good conditions.
> I personally believe that two new levels (young children and teenagers) of
> encyclopedic content would be quite challenging and maybe too ambitious.
> Moreover, a system with multiple levels of content or workspaces (for
> schools, adults...) wouldn't make it, if not in a completely new way on
> which I have no idea neither guarantees it would succeed.
>
>
>>> In the same way, Wikipedia is roughly written by students/academics for
>>> high-school pupils, there is a kind of interval between the average
>>> editor
>>> and average reader.
>>
>> That's unclear - sometimes there are both short and long versions of
>> WP articles.
>> The language for specialized topics is often much more advanced than
>> suitable for high-school students.
>
>
> Sure, it is certainly the same on wikis for children regarding short or long
> articles or their level. Out of this I would make the argument that it seem
> quite vain to be willing to address every precise age ranges.
> What if a 15 years old has not his dedicated wiki encyclopedia, between a
> Wikikids and Wikipedia ?
> Well at the moment, a 10 years old German, or English speaking child that
> look for information is mostly led to Wikipedia, which can be considered as
> a more acute issue.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids
>
>
> --
> Mathias Damour
> 49 rue Carnot
> F-74000 Annecy
> 00 33 (0)4 57 09 10 56
> 00 33 (0)6 27 13 65 51
> mathias.damour@laposte.net
> http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Astirmays
>
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--
Samuel Klein          @metasj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266

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