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@davidgerard.co.uk, +44 7733 223584 Andrew Cates, CEO, SOS Children UK: andrew@soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Elizabeth Rodgers, Press Officer, SOS Children UK: elizabeth@soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Retrieved from "http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/SOSChildrenUK2007"
Presumably a similar quote from Michael Snow would be nice :-)
- d.
2008/9/30 Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org:
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@davidgerard.co.uk, +44 7733 223584 Andrew Cates, CEO, SOS Children UK: andrew@soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Elizabeth Rodgers, Press Officer, SOS Children UK: elizabeth@soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Retrieved from "http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/SOSChildrenUK2007"
2008/9/30 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
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).
There is an error in [[tank]] due to issues with the video. Not sure how their system deals with videos mind.
Thanks. I have logged it
A
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:27 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/30 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
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).
There is an error in [[tank]] due to issues with the video. Not sure how their system deals with videos mind.
-- geni
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