New subject: An equivalent of Wikipedia for children and the information and participation rights

9 Jul 2017

Le 03/07/2017 à 22:22, Ziko van Dijk a écrit :
...
  Hello Mathias,

 Thank you for the notice.

 It happened by chance only Friday that we had a workshop for our Klexikon
 (Kinderlexikon, in German). The university Duisburg-Essen had invited
 Michael, Beat and me to talk about the wiki encyclopedia for children and
 have a workshop in which ca. 25 drafts were written.

 The students (mostly future teachers) and university staff in our workshop
 were motivated especially because writing for a specific target group -
 children from 6 to 12 - relates to a key competence of a teacher. They
 found it tricky to conceive and write those drafts but found it an
 interesting challenge.

 Of course such a workshop is quite different from a Wikipedia course - just
 because the Klexikon uses much less code. The Klexikon is also very
 different from the approach Vikidia represents.

 I am very positive about our experience on Friday and am happy to talk with
 you about it. 
Thanks for your response, for sure, students - future teachers are a good potential
editors and people to be initiated to such a wiki.
We had sometimes editing projects on Vikidia from these class, but without any of us.

Indeed, there is some differences in Klexikon and Vikidia approaches and the way they
work. Vikidia aims to involve young people in building it. 
It is a nevertheless a intergenerational work. This side does quite well. I would say it
is a natural way to be in society that we may miss in our modern countries, which sort
pupils by age and often segregate ages groups.
Child and teenager vikidian most often respect adults editors and appreciate to work and
interact with them, which is reciprocal. We do have controversy and quarrels on Vikidia,
typically on being rather lenient, tolerant toward the newbies or strict. Oddly, there is
young and older people in each side of this kind of case...

Our weakness would rather be :

  * one that you may find in any wiki or any group of volunteers: we are never as many and
as active as we would wish !
  * that quite a few articles may be too difficult for the age range we announce to write
for, which is difficult to assess.

By the way, I would like to ask on this list: what do you think about Simple English
Wikipedia, especially if English is your language?
Is it a occasional resource and place to work in education programs? 
Maybe for younger people than higher education students, or for lack of subject to write
on in Wikipedia?

-- 
Mathias Damour
49 rue Carnot
74000 Annecy
04 57 09 10 56
06 27 13 65 51
mathias.damour(a)gmx.fr

Re: [Wikimedia Education] An equivalent of Wikipedia for children and the information and participation rights