[Foundation-l] Re: Wikijunior as a new Sister Project

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Nicholas Moreau <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:

> The reasons that I'm pushing for a seperate domain for Wikijunior is:
> 
> - We need a stable version for kids, that kids and adults alike can't 
> vandalise.
> 
> - We need a more kid-friendly skin and navigation for the MediaWiki, so 
> curious kids don't get sidetracked in "Recently uploaded images" and the 
> like.
> 
> - We need more attention for the project. We've got at least 55 contributors 
> just to the Solar System book, which is fantastic, but we need perfection.

For the above reasons, I do not object to having a separate site for publishing
snapshots of WikiJunior content that was developed on Wikibooks. However,
longer term we may instead want to have an internal ‘Publish this book/article’
feature as part of a future reader validation function. ‘Publishing’ would
create a static copy of the most recent validated item. 
 
> As Wikijunior develops past say, 50 books, we would benefit from a seperate 
> editing wiki. While we're creating seperate and publishable reference works, 
> the ability to merge them into one greater encyclopedic form.

Large Wikipedia wikis do perfectly well with thousands of edits per day by a
great many people participating in a lot of WikiProjects (both different and
related). So the ‘benefit’ prediction is pure speculation if not proved wrong. 
 
> On Robert's suggestion of Wikijunior being a "stealth" proposal, we've been 
> around since mid-2004, I've had something relating to the project docked on 
> the front page of the English Meta essentially daily since then, and the 
> publicly accessible Board meeting minutes mention the creation of the 
> project.

It is essentially a parent WikiProject on Wikibooks not unlike the tree of life
WikiProject and its daughter WikiProjects on the various Wikipedias. 

I don’t see any pressing need to fork off this effort from Wikibooks and thus
impoverish that project. WikiJunior has helped a invigorate Wikibooks, which
has long suffered from inadequate software features and the much greater
demands placed on contributors (creating a book with x pages is a bit harder
than creating a set of related encyclopedia articles that filled the same
space). 

What we need are MediaWiki features that better facilitate wiki book creation.
On the top of the list for me would be the ability to search within a single
book (searching within a category could do this and also benefit the other
projects), easily create new pages in the same book with all navigational links
auto-generated, and have auto-indexing and auto-assist annotation features.
Having a book-specific RC would also be nice (I see this can already be done
per category from the [Related changes] link; being able to see Related changes
one or two levels below the current cat would also be nice). 

-- mav



	
		
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