On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:39 AM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
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I don't know if wikipedia should have a chapter specific to children because it would be culturally biased by our views about education.
I think you mean 'project' rather than 'chapter' My view of a kids' encyclopedia is: this is a popular type of reference work, with dozens of examples in the print world, some very popular. There are also a number of wiki-versions of the same we can learn from. We don't need to overthink this, we can just try it out and see how it works. Trying new things should be no big deal.
- for the non-semantic persons (who don't rely much on words), more
direct images (or photos) and animations (or videos). For example explaining the size of the sun and of planets showing their relative size works better than sheer numbers for most of people, or at least is a necessary intermediate step for understanding the numbers.
These are great ideas. Whether they should be on their own separate Project, or provided as 'flavors' of articles on existing projects, is a separate question.
Articles that center around visual and media descriptions are fun for all sorts of readers. (likewise visual dictionaries).
- for people not fluent with vocabulary, use only the 500 (200? 1000?)
most common english words (a bot could signal rare words)
There could also be hovertext with explanations for words not in that list of 1000.
- replace complex equations with qualitative explanations
Not necessarily replace, but use qualitative explanations (like good popular science works) with equations provided for those who are interested. Deep technical details could be provided in footnotes, perhaps with a standard link to the right section of a more complex article (on normal Wikipedia, or in a specialist reference).
Also, for illiterate persons, it would be great to include a "play" button
Yes! Text to speech is already good enough for this in a few languages. And we can give much more prominence to 'spoken Wikipedia' resources, which many more people would contribute to if it were highlighted.
SJ