My point is: If there are different sites (like wikimini and vikidia)
that expressly target different audiences, that's not necessarily a
sign of incompatibility. I think it should be okay to have more than
one article on a given topic, in any wiki for kids, if the different
articles have significantly different language levels.
(There might be only a short set of ~1000 articles in an encyclopedia
for 3-6 year olds -- but certainly those articles would be different
than those written for 8-18 year olds!)
SJ
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Mathias Damour
<mathias.damour(a)laposte.net> wrote:
Le 23/04/2013 04:30, Samuel Klein a écrit :
On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Mathias Damour
<mathias.damour(a)laposte.net> wrote:
Your proposal on this 2010 discussion, (
http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Vikidia:Wikimini_et_Vikidia ) to which I
anserwed
by the one you mention, was that Vikida would switch its reader target to
13
to 18 years old people, and cohabit in this manner with Wikimini which
would
be for 8-13 years old children.
One of my arguments against that was that I disagree with the assumption
that this proposal held, which is that children schould write for
children,
and teenagers for teenagers.
I think "children" and "teenagers" are different audiences.
They are, still every single child may be a different audience...
Authors of any age can write for those two
audiences.
I could imagine having up to three versions of articles about any
topic: with complexity suitable for audiences of ages "6-12",
"13-19",
"any".
One may think about it.
However, I think in regards to legibility and having a clear and mobilizing
goal, it may not be productive.
There is no working wikikids in some major languages. When they do exist,
say in french, whereas some primary schools websites link Vikidia, many
still rather link Wikipedia, which means it's hard to gather an audience
even if we think we have the content that fits to it.
Someone that is quite involved in the education innovation debate in France
now use to tell about how he figure a resource that would be adapted to each
individual. I didn't get easily what he means, may-be a Facebook-like system
that would suggest you content that fits to your level of knowledge
(automaticaly or by peer suggestion ?) It may be related to the concept of
"zone of proximal development" (see on WP if you need ;-)).
We had a talk and I guess the idea was to integrate Vikidia into this.
However, I don't get it. Be it an automatic system that use Vikidia's
content among others, that's fine. But when it comes to produce content, we
have to worry about our own consistency first, in order to allow the users
to work in good conditions.
I personally believe that two new levels (young children and teenagers) of
encyclopedic content would be quite challenging and maybe too ambitious.
Moreover, a system with multiple levels of content or workspaces (for
schools, adults...) wouldn't make it, if not in a completely new way on
which I have no idea neither guarantees it would succeed.
In the
same way, Wikipedia is roughly written by students/academics for
high-school pupils, there is a kind of interval between the average
editor
and average reader.
That's unclear - sometimes there are both short and long versions of
WP articles.
The language for specialized topics is often much more advanced than
suitable for high-school students.
Sure, it is certainly the same on wikis for children regarding short or long
articles or their level. Out of this I would make the argument that it seem
quite vain to be willing to address every precise age ranges.
What if a 15 years old has not his dedicated wiki encyclopedia, between a
Wikikids and Wikipedia ?
Well at the moment, a 10 years old German, or English speaking child that
look for information is mostly led to Wikipedia, which can be considered as
a more acute issue.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids
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