thanx for help. Gone for
Curriculum-based offline Wikipedia: 40,000 child-checked articles & images
The other angles (that we are basically making Wikipedia content more accessible) we will cover in press release and accompanying letters.
Since you ask on "checking", the checking was such a labour of love I am not even sure we will manage it again. For the record, we had volunteers who were a mixture of students, ex-schools teachers and a few other professionals who went through the version histories of articles, choose two versions by "credible" editors reasonably apart (a month and edits by five editors) , checked the diffs for vandalism, choose the better version, skim read the article, noted sections or text strings for deletion if they looked dubious (do parsnips really induce photosensitivity which is unsourced?). We also took a conscious decision to remove most info about sexual orientation and scandal in biogs, also reduce the volume in year pages of serial killers and terrorist acts to try to get good news/bad news in kilter. A reasonable sample of each volunteers work was double checked by one of two office staff. In some cases (the year pages for example) the volunteers were pretty thorough in checking facts at least for consistency with Wikipedia biogs and we corrected WP a fair bit. In others a recent version by a good quality editor with no vandalism in diffs versus a month earlier was used without much challenge. We then ran a rude word checker and re-choose or deleted where we hit c*** f*** p**** (except birth control and a couple of others) incest (except Anne Boleyn where it was on her death warrant) and a couple of other strings. The only problem with this is some quotations in biogs are now inaccurate to the tune of missing redundant "f***ing". Such is life.
I notice already one teachers discussion forum has a teacher congratulating us on getting the difficult part of the Inca history correct "unlike the main Wikipedia". Of course, that was just version selection to a good editor.
Andrew
On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2008/10/16 Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com:
On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Would "Wikipedia offline - 45,000 checked articles and images" fit?
What does "checked" mean? Verified accurate? (I presume not.) Child-friendly?
Better to be precise if possible.
It depends on quite how the collection *is* checked, which I'm not entirely sure about. But in many ways, a snappy description on the outside and then a detailed precise explanation once you start it up seems to be the best way to go...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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