From: Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one
Wikipedia"
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Friday, June 25, 2010, 1:07 PM
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:11 PM,
phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)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