I have tried to read all the interventions of this very interesting discussion. I work a lot in Italian Vikidia with my students (11 years old) and I believe that one of Vikidia's roles is also, not the only one, that of involving the very young in the wiki world. Maybe they will become wikipedians .... At the same time, I think it is absolutely necessary to pursue a project like that of Txikipedia, i.e. the possibility of having the same wikipedia page written in different languages. Wikipedia, like all digital knowledge, should not be based on the "old" paper encyclopedias. For example, a (wiki) encyclopedia addresses dyslexics with videos, avoiding writing, eventually dyslexics learn to read with more appropriate texts and in suitable contexts. Grazie tantissimo a tutti Matteo
Il giorno sab 25 giu 2022 alle ore 00:49 Neurodivergent Netizen idoh.idreamofhorses@gmail.com ha scritto:
How could we say we velcome young editors and require that they conceal that they are young?
We manage to do exactly that, even though we, too, can guess with some imperfect accuracy, that certain people are in fact children.
I just share an idea for anybody to possibly take it or elaborate his own from it!
Yeah, I doubt anyone is going to create a kids-only encyclopedia as successful as yours, and I think few here would be open to the idea. You’d probably have better success collaborating with school districts and similar organizations.
From, I dream of horses She/her
On Jun 24, 2022, at 3:42 PM, Mathias Damour mathias.damour@gmx.fr wrote:
Yes, Vikidia editors are allowed (not required) to tell their age on their user page. In the long run (or not so long), other users would roughly guess it anyway. We get to know each other online and I guess it helps the communication to know the age group to which belong the people you're talking with. How could we say we velcome young editors and require that they conceal that they are young?
No, I don't want money from the WMF or somebody else, for I am no more in charge of the Vikidia association, and I never planned to take in charge myself the kind of project I tell about. I just share an idea for anybody to possibly take it or elaborate his own from it!
Envoyé: vendredi 24 juin 2022 à 23:21 De: "Neurodivergent Netizen" idoh.idreamofhorses@gmail.com À: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Objet: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Small joy of the day: Txikipedia
When I had a look to the most viewed articles (not exactly recently) I had the impression that it actually reach one of its goal that is to be a resource for non native english speaker (that moreover don't have a well developped Wikipedia in their native language, such as indians of a minority language). Yet it wasn't children interest or school curriculum subjects that were much viewed but rather adult topics.
We could fix that by dedicating time to subjects children would learn in school. We don’t need a separate wiki.
However, regular users have in mind that the age told by any user isn't verified.
One of the findings of fact in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Protecting_... is that:
Self-identified children may be children, adult predators, trolls(→), adult privacy-watchers testing our policies, or law enforcement personnel.
So they might be children, child abusers, adults lying because they think it’s funny, people looking to bring down the reputation of websites that don’t respect the privacy of children, or a police officer that can arrest someone in real life. All of these bring up different issues as to the safety of children and the reputation of the adults that want to help them. This is why the arbitration committee decided this was the best option for editors who might actually be children:
Users who appear to be children editing in good faith who disclose identifying personal information may be appropriately counseled. Deletion and oversight may be used in appropriate cases to remove the information.
In other words, kids aren’t allowed to disclose their age. Of course, people editing in bad faith would be blocked, anyways. Are you saying that kids are allowed to disclose age on Wikikids?
We disable the e-mail function from one's user account to another, so there is no private message unless one editor would have displayed his e-mail adress or on account on another social media.
That’s going to add an obstacle to writing to oversight and the emergency team that intervenes when someone threatens suicide or homicide, along with a few other teams that have a “role account” that takes advantage of the “email this user” feature.
I mean that if by chance someone or an organisation would want to developp a free documentary resource for children and would be eager to invest in it, there would be a way to do it: there is allready a base of articles in some Vikidia versions like the english one and an organisation that proved to be sustainable (actually very closed to the one of Wikipedia), then some funds would allow to catch up the time of "organic growth" that some wiki encyclopedia for children had. I guess it would be promotion, communication, and possibly paid translation to get the most interesting, best quality, most usefull articles from several wikis for children and from Simple English Wikipedia (with some data analysis/study to identify and select them), to get a core of say 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 articles in one language. It would be quite a big operation, but it may be worth the investment. Getting a quality free encyclopedia for children in a matter of months.
Are you saying you want money from the WMF? Or someone affiliated with the WMF?
From, I dream of horses She/her
On Jun 24, 2022, at 2:06 PM, Mathias Damour mathias.damour@gmx.fr wrote:
Hi,
I think that SEWP was created like it is, partly by fear of creating a project openly directed to children, and I'm afraid it precisely make it not so compelling for them.
How is Simple English Wikipedia not compelling for kids? Define “not compelling.”
Well, I didn't closely study SEWP, so I may be unfair, that's rather my impressions : The main rule is the simple language rather than explain a subject in a accessible way, so you can have long and not so accessible articles in simple language. When I had a look to the most viewed articles (not exactly recently) I had the impression that it actually reach one of its goal that is to be a resource for non native english speaker (that moreover don't have a well developped Wikipedia in their native language, such as indians of a minority language). Yet it wasn't children interest or school curriculum subjects that were much viewed but rather adult topics.
I took a look at Vikidia, thought I could do something for them, signed up with an account, read what I could find of the guidance, and created an article on Underwater diving, following the rules as I understood them, using properly attributed CC-by-sa content from Simple English Wikipedia as a basic framework, and was busy expanding it when it was deleted without discussion by user Ajeje_Brazorf with the edit summary (Please don't copy from simple wikipedia}, and no explanation why not. If I had done that on English Wikipedia I would risk losing my admin bit. If that is how new users are routinely treated there that encyclopedia is doomed. I will not be back to waste my time there.
By the way, sorry for that, I guess it is not specific to Vikidia in english to experiment such diagreement with newcomers, there is a discussion on this wiki about what happened.
On top of that, it would seem that you were able to sign up easily without verifying your age; both verifying age and not can be problematic.
Verifying age makes things safer in terms of everyone knowing that if someone says they’re a kid, they’re a kid, and if they’re an adult, they’re an adult. Part of online grooming and police sting operations is people saying “I’m a kid, let’s meet offline." It can be problematic due to reasons of privacy. It’s not like you want everyone knowing the age of a child who’s online. That can mostly but entirely alleviated by only having the administration know everyones’ birthdate, and forcing admins to have strict account security.
We don't ask nor verify the editors ages on Vikidia. There is no status attached to the user's age (with some few exception like check-user...), so few reason to lie about our age if we tell it. However, regular users have in mind that the age told by any user isn't verified. We disable the e-mail function from one's user account to another, so there is no private message unless one editor would have displayed his e-mail adress or on account on another social media. And we suppress identifying information that a child would write on his user page. To be complete, we noticed that the UK Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 appears to mandate some verifications for some status like admins on a wiki for children (someone that would become administrator of Vikidia in english if he is more than 16 and lives in the UK would have to provide his identity and proof that he has passed the british vetting process). See https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Vikidia:Legal_matters#UK_Safeguarding_Vulnerable...
Actually, Vikidia in english does exist, with 4,035 articles !
Oh, okay, so it’s going to be mostly out of whole cloth, not entirely. I’m not sure how many articles English Wikipedia has, but I know it’s in the millions.
They may be a way to promote a existing (or to be launched) wiki encyclopedia for children, to "use the momentum of Wikipedia to make it easier to discover”
I believe I’ve stated more or less stated that you can’t use our momentum since we need for the projects we have.
That's a constant pattern, your favorite wiki may have 500 or 5 millions articles, 2 or 20,000 active users, you allway feel you lack content and editors ! ;-)
I mean that if by chance someone or an organisation would want to developp a free documentary resource for children and would be eager to invest in it, there would be a way to do it: there is allready a base of articles in some Vikidia versions like the english one and an organisation that proved to be sustainable (actually very closed to the one of Wikipedia), then some funds would allow to catch up the time of "organic growth" that some wiki encyclopedia for children had. I guess it would be promotion, communication, and possibly paid translation to get the most interesting, best quality, most usefull articles from several wikis for children and from Simple English Wikipedia (with some data analysis/study to identify and select them), to get a core of say 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 articles in one language. It would be quite a big operation, but it may be worth the investment. Getting a quality free encyclopedia for children in a matter of months.
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