On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Nikhil, I register my strong objection for this. There are various concerns even if the content is children friendly:
- The content should be free of typos, factual errors. If a school teacher
browses through random content and finds that the content is full of errors, not much useful then he may not circulate the CD to students. Once people get a bad opinion of Wiki, it will take lot of effort to get rid of that. If the teachers do not take note of these and circulate it is still worse as students get wrong info. Since there is a tendency for uninformed readers to believe whatever they see in print, we have a responsibility here. I understand you are not distributing / preparing DVDs for sake of school children. Nevertheless, why can't we make sure to distribute high quality verified content to whoever it is?
My approach is different. we are teaching the teachers how to type in their language, and telling them how they can create wikipages. We have told them that the wikipedia is not a completed project and needs their help. The teachers and students are not mere consumers of the knowledge wikimedians and experts create. They can detect edit, and correct mistakes on their own. During the the process they will learn as well as become fellow wikimedians. We are teaching them how to correct as well.
If we are only distributing the content without making them aware of the background of the content, I agree with you, we need to be careful.
Neither free software nor wikipedia succeeded without frequent releases. Both the children and teachers can understand their roles and help themselves. We can convince the administrators about this process as well.
However, if we know that the current school zim files contain some pages with vandalism then we can remove them. But, we can also let the teachers and students detect the vandalism as well since our job will never end.
- Articles need to be vandalism free. Any random zim backup you distribute
may have vandal edits in at least few instances. Imagine what will be the reaction of media, academia and Government departments if a state leader's page is distributed with vandal edits.
When the teachers detect the mistake, they could edit the main wikipedia themselves. It is time we tell them that education is not mere consumption of correct or perfect knowledge, but to participate in eternal perfection. Correction opportunity gives a fantastic opportunity for the teachers as well as students to understand how society works.
When they are connected they access the pages from full dumps. When we give them offline version we need to tell them that the information is not guaranteed to be accurate.
-- GN
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org