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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