Re: [Foundation-l] Wikijunior - State of the Project

Unfortunately, the number of contributors and contributions has dropped to an alarming low over the past few months. Our ideal contributor would be someone with a background in children's education, or children working with adult assistance; so these are the kind of contributors we would like to reach out to. Private discussions with a few contributors have led me to believe that more primary educators would be willing to contribute and use Wikijunior except that the problems of vandalism and potentially incorrect content are difficult for them to get past. You see, here in the US a teacher could not only get fired for showing her class some of the things I've seen on a vandalized Wiki page, but could actually end up in jail. There is not a big problem with vandalism at Wikijunior and the Wikibooks admins are generally effective vandal fighters. Still, it has happened that there was a module vandalized with profanity stuck into the middle of a paragraph that stayed that way for more than four months.

The idea of creating a static site at Wikijunior.org has been discussed before. .... Here's one way that I think it could work effectively with a minimum of developer time: 1) Wikijunior.org would run Mediawiki software and have the import function enabled from Wikibooks. 2) Wikijunior.org would have a stripped down default skin with larger fonts and no sidebar as its default. (See for example: http://www.mono-project.com.) 3) Administrators could change their skin to make the editing tools visible. 4) All modules on Wikijunior.org would be editable by administrators only. 5) Book development would continue on Wikibooks and be open to anonymous edits as it is now. 6) When a module was ready, it would be transwikied to the Wikijunior.org site by an administrator. 7) Each module would have a "contributing" link that would link back to the Wikijunior development site on Wikibooks.