And there is good material from other projects that is
suitable for kids,
just not packaged in the wikijunior format; some of the better-edited
series on simple-en, some of the media collections on commons and flickr,
some of the early work on wikiversity and wikieducator.
This is a good point. A dedicated
wikijunior.org site could be used to host all sorts of
child-related materials from all projects that produce them.
Better yet, you could make it read-and-tunnelled-write
: a 'static' site,
but with edit links that take you to the page on the feeder site that lets
you edit the latest non-static version.
This idea wasn't explicitly stated, but I think it's been in the back of
everybody's mind. I do worry about giving children a direct link back the the working
version, because the working version could still contain vandalism which children shouldnt
be exposed to. A link to a "Toolbox" or something which in turn contained links
to the working version would likely be a better solution. We can probably deal with these
kinds of specifics later.
There are some ideas for a pared-down mediawiki
interface that could
probably be implemented as a skin...
I've heard many of these ideas, but finding people to implement them is always the
problem. Our devs are busy so I dare not bother them with this. I would be willing to work
on the project from a software standpoint, but i'm no interface artist.
For physical publication, I hear Bob Young @ Lulu is a
fan of wikipedia;
perhaps Lulu could host a section for print-on-demand wikijunior books and
help draw a bit more attention to them.
A wikijunior book was posted to Lulu a while back, and was pulled down by the foundation.
Some heated discussion from both sides resulted in the subject being dropped entirely. I
would like to hear something from the foundation about how such a thing would be possible
before we go through that kind of hassle again. This might be the perfect occasion for the
board to make such a statement...
On the OLPC side of things, I am working on collections
to ship with the
machines; we can include a 'wikijunior' section, say a selection of html +
edit/contribute links as above, once that exists. English and Spanish
and Portuguese collections would get immediate use; and feedback, if the
mechanism for that is simple enough.
Getting PDF versions would be a simple matter, we have lots of experience with that. We
could prepare some easy HTML versions too, by calling &printable=yes. It would take
more effort to get better quality files. Can the OLPC handle PDF files? If so, I think
that would be an ideal method.
--Andrew Whitworth
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