--- On Fri, 6/25/10, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
From: Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia" To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, June 25, 2010, 1:07 PM On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:11 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
But, to be fair, do we ask such questions of our other
projects? I do
not recall being asked if I was a trained encyclopedia
writer or a
trained journalist when I joined Wikimedia :) Perhaps
we should ask
these kinds of hard questions of a new project, but
also realize that
we may not be able to predict all of the answers ahead
of time.
My first answer is that Wikipedia is good enough for children and that we do not need a Wikipedia fork with dumb language. If you think differently, please find or make relevant research which would prove your position.
This type of project is original research per se. (Making an image, movie or educational game is OR. Making rules for language usage is POV and OR. Saying that Wikipedia is not good for children is POV and OR.) And we have to be extremely careful with any kind of original research. We have two opposing projects in way of handling OR: Wikinews, which handles it very well and Wikiversity, which doesn't. And if we are not able to drive well project with educational courses for adults, I can say that Wikijunior would be a disaster after just a couple of months of independent life.
The problem with such projects is that they are usually a field for self-proclaimed experts to promote their ideological agenda. As it is about child education, it will be full of very stupid explanations, like that children are not able to understand this or that or that children mustn't hear something because it would kill them.
Such strong labeling of the goals and make-up of this group wishing to work on a Medical Encyclopedia for Children really needs to be supported by some evidence. Especially as I don't believe they are participating in this conversation and therefore unable to clarify. I am afraid I don't speak German, but I would like to see what I can gather from machine translation if you would please direct me to the proper links.
Birgitte SB