On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
On 24 June 2010 15:04, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
- Scope and name: Maybe it would practically make no big difference
whether the project is called "simple" or "for kids". Poor readers and adult beginning readers (natives or not) tend to read texts that are meant for children anyway. It could make a difference in promoting, though. A scope question can also be whether certain kinds of explicit images are allowed.
I strongly disagree. There is a big difference between simple language and simple concepts. Children need simple concepts (basically, you can't assume as much prior knowledge because they haven't had time to learn things that adults consider to be common knowledge). Adults that are just learning a language need simple language because they haven't learnt complicated vocabulary yet.
Said what I was going to say. One problem I've noticed with the Simple English Wikipedia is that they seem not to have truly decided whether they're for children or for ESL adults. There are irreconcilable differences between these two groups in terms of background and conceptual understanding, as you said, which bleed into issues of what content is acceptable for a given age group: far beyond explicit pictures, you need to decide how to cover topics like sex, religion, death, war, and rape--if they should be covered at all for that age group.
I think a single project devoted to "children" would fail unless it was well-segmented: material designed for a 6-year-old should be very different from material designed for a 12-year-old (in terms of what we expect them to know, what we expect them to be able to grasp, and what content is acceptable).
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
If you don't have a strong background in a field then drinking from the fire hose of full-complexity concepts is hard no matter if you are a child or not. If you do have a reasonable background a simplified article will be patronizing and, worse, not especially useful.
I don't think there's anything wrong with making assumptions about what a person of a given age is likely/expected to know: school curricula are based upon such assumptions, after all. Children who find "kiddie books" patronizing and useless can choose to access the "grownup" versions instead. It has been ever thus with precocious youth. But I certainly agree with you that we shouldn't expect kids to know/be able to grasp less about everything; we should expect kids to know more about things that kids tend to know more about.
I hope the study that the Board is commissioning consults with educators who teach at any age levels we might think about creating new projects for.