Okay, David, I have joined this mail list. Thank you for the invitation.
For background, the 2007 Schools Wikipedia is a big success: it was distributed via (amongst others) the "hole in the wall" project for rural Indian kids, the Shuttleworth fundation to South Africa Schools, SOS Children offices in India, Pakistan and Southern Africa, various local Wikipedians who burned copies for local schools and its listed all over the place (e.g. local and state gov sites etc). It even had distributers in Australia and New Zealand. We given thousands of free downloads (we have moved this to Amazon's download service), and mailed just under two thousand DVDs on request to all over the world. Schools are running it on intranets and even running mirrors on school websites (google for "2007 schools wikipedia selection"). We do not have an accurate user count but are fairly confident it is well over a million users.
Even the online copy (which wasn't really the point) is rapidly moving up Alexa and will soon be the leading "checked content from Wikipedia online" site. Offline that's been us for quite a while.
The 2008/9 version will be available for general view for final checks next week and for download and DVD two weeks after this. The article list has gone up to 5400 articles with about 2000 added and 600 removed from the 2007 version as more relevant articles for kids have reached adequate quality thresholds. Pretty much all of them have been updated to more recent versions since the 2007 version. They will still be sorted by curriculum topics with some portal pages for curriculum subjects added. Still this will be free by any route. We might skip "Torrent" which wasn't a great success.
That do for now?
Andrew
On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:55 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/8 joseph seddon life_is_bitter_sweet@hotmail.co.uk:
I know that David gerard was working on a
wikipedia for schools project. I'm unsure where that is in terms of progress.
It's not mine, it's Andrew Cates' (User:BozMo) (cc'ed). It's going strong :-) It's pretty much the best practical realisation yet of "let's write an encyclopedia for people in poor countries who really need one." 2008 edition coming soon.
(Andrew, please join this list and comment! WMUK pushing the Schools Project is the sort of thing it'd be great for.)
- d.