Jay,
Sorry for the delay in replying to this which was a mixture of
technical and life. I think we need to start moving on press releases
etc.
Here was last year's quote form Anthere: Florence Devouard, chair of
the Wikimedia Foundation, said: "The Wikimedia Foundation aims to
encourage the development and distribution of reference content to the
public free of charge: this project is an excellent example of free
resources being offered to a particular audience which we warmly
encourage, and are proud to support."
The 2008 Schools Wikipedia is now available for general viewing at
http://schools-wikipedia.org and will be available for download and on
DVD in two weeks time (so we can pick up final bugs). I appreciate we
won't use it but I attach Alexa's traffic graph of "online only"
schools wikipedia traffic versus "entire" citizendium traffic :). Our
draft press release, mainly based on last year (numbers to be
confirmed) coinciding with the availability by download was going to
be:
=================================
SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, have
released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools on DVD, a complete
update on the previous Wikipedia for Schools.
The Selection DVD, which may be freely copied in entirety, has the
content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia - with 30,000 pictures, 20
million words and articles on 5,500 topics, all of which have been
hand checked and selected from Wikipedia, and sorted by curriculum
topic. The Wikipedia for Schools is run on school intranets for
security or in remote locations in the developing world where Internet
access is a problem. It has been distributed throughout the world by
other charitable groups such as the Shuttleworth Foundation in South
Africa, the "hole in the wall" charity to rural India, local
governments, local SOS Children offices and individual wikipedians.
SOS Children estimate that the schools selection has several million
offline users, but also more than 7000 human visitors a day to the
online copy at
http://schools-wikipedia.org , making it by far the
most popular "checked" version of Wikipedia.
Dr Andrew Cates, CEO of SOS Children (and himself a Wikipedia
administrator) said: "Wikipedia just gets better and better as a
resource for schools. All the articles have been reviewed and updated
since last year, 600 of the weakest ones we have removed and 1600 new
articles have been added. This year for the first time we have
included some "portal pages" which give a broad overview of topics and
for the first time the community have written articles on topics (e.g.
Portal:Early Modern Britain) specifically at our request based on the
National Curriculum. We are delighted with the success of the project
and warmly thank both SOS Children and WIkipedia volunteers for their
hard work."
SOS Children is best known as the world's largest orphan charity (UK
Charity No. 1069204) but is also a very large educational charity
running 192 schools with 91,000 pupils in the developing world. See
www.soschildren.org
The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a US non-profit charitable
organisation dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and
distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full
content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The
Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively
edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of
the 10 most visited websites in the world.
Summary points:
The selection is organised around National Curriculum subjects
The articles have been cleaned up and checked for suitability for and
usefulness to children
Website:
http://schools-wikipedia.org ;
Available for free download at xyz
This Selection aims to correct criticisms made of Wikipedia as a
school resource:
the Selection has been screened;
the Selection cannot be vandalized;
children cannot "meet" adults there;
there are no very explicit articles or content. (The most detailed
article is Birth Control , which has been kept technical and neutral).
offline access can be easily arranged
Note: The Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a separate project from
the awaited 0.7 Release Version of Wikipedia, although they share
technology and volunteers. The Selection for Schools has fewer
articles than expected from the 0.7 Release Version (which does not
used manual checking of articles) but larger pictures, and a
schools-related indexing system.It is entirely free, and has no
commercial advertising.
Contact:
David Gerard, UK media contact, Wikimedia Foundation:
wp(a)davidgerard.co.uk, +44 7733 223584
Andrew Cates, CEO, SOS Children UK: andrew(a)soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589
Elizabeth Rodgers, Press Officer, SOS Children UK:
elizabeth(a)soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589
Retrieved from
"http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/SOSChildrenUK2007"
