Hi Swaroop,

With a large quota of say 9000 articles and a comprehensive basis of the SOS compilation to work on, de facto the article range will exceed the school syllabus and range into the area of the college student's interests. However, the aim is to provide :

* a comprehensive coverage of a subject, which would be found generally adequate in all respects in an intenational scenario.
* ensure the Indian aspects of a subject are covered to the same depth as the international aspects of a subject and perhaps even more.
* Some of the more esoteric subjects pertaining only to British interest may be deleted such as [[Bede]] and [[Boudica]] in History.

The encyclopedia must always be more than what is necessary in order to quench a student's natural curiosity.

Our choice must be a broad base which logically falls into the core of a topic. The school syllabus is to be carefully scanned to identify the main topics in Wikipedia which cover the scope of each lesson and to ensure that they are present in the compilation. Thus the school syllabus is to be used as a broad check that the main topics are covered by the choice of topics rather than as the starting point.

That said, it is impossible to check against the syllabus of every school system. For the very first iteration, I propose that we get hold of the syllabus of the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th syllabus of CBSE available online at their site here.

http://cbse.nic.in/senior_sch_curr_vol1_2011-2009.pdf

Subsequently, we may extend the syllabus check to lower classes than 9th standard and also to other school systems than the CBSE.

Hope this answers your queries satisfactorily.

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
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2011/12/9 Swaroop Rao <raul.swaroop@gmail.com>

Thanks for the reply. Another question: Does the content necessarily have to follow the school syllabus? If not, then how closely should it follow the syllabus in order to be effective, and at the same time, interesting (i.e. not boring)?

Thanks,

Swaroop Rao
(MikeLynch)

2011/12/9 Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur@gmail.com>
Hi Swaroop,

That is a good question. In my humble opinion, we need to think of school as upto Twelfth standards since so many of these are still in schools. Often at that point of time, more information is needed especially for those who are curious. Practically though Wikipedia would probably be used for Classes 5 and above, with the greater the class the greater likelihood of the encyclopedia being used. So syllabus from class 5 and above should be considered.

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
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2011/12/9 Swaroop Rao <raul.swaroop@gmail.com>
Congrats Ashwin, and thank you for taking this project up.

Just to clarify, what does "School" include? Is it the Indian definition of school, that is classes 1-10, or the American definition, that is classes 1-12?

Also, what is the intended target audience, is it from 1-10, or is it just High school?

Best,
Swaroop Rao
(MikeLynch)