[Foundation-l] Wikijunior

[Andrew Whitworth]

We've received a recent report from one of our editors that edits to Wikijunior have been in general decline for some months now. This is in contrast to what I would identify as a trend of increasing edits to english Wikibooks as a whole. We have the wikicharts page counter running on our site, and although we've only been counting page hits for less then a month now, there is still an identifiable trend of decreased readership in wikijunior books as well.

We're trying to do more advertising for wikijunior, but there is a limited amount that we can do locally. We've included large links to wikijunior on our main page, a link in the side bar, and we post featured wikijunior books on the main page as well. None of these changes appear to be having the dramatic effect that we are hoping for.

I would like to propose a number of things that we can do to try and draw more attention to Wikijunior, both for contributors and editors.

1)  I've started a new logo selection process for Wikijunior at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikijunior/Logo. Wikijunior has never had an official logo, although there have been some efforts to select one in the past. 
2) The idea has been discussed before (although I cannot remember where) of turning www.wikijunior.org (which currently redirects to en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior) into a read-only host for completed wikijunior books. Books which pass muster could be uploaded to that website for read-only access. The site would likely need to have a highly-simplified interface designed for use by children. What kind of effort would this take? Would we need a regular MediaWiki installation for this, or could we get away with something smaller and simpler?
3) Start considering the idea of physical publication and distribution. This had been brought up before, but was delayed and never brought up again. Barring physical publication, we could try to get completed wikijunior books included into projects like OLPC which are targeted at children.
4) We need to find people who are interested in writing books for children, or people who are willing to donate books to Wikijunior. English Wikibooks (I cannot speak for other language projects) is very lenient when it comes to Wikijunior books,  and we would allow many "cutesy" types of books for children that might otherwise be considered policy violations. We understand that a child's book can still be instructional even if it doesnt look like a regular textbook. 

I would be very interested in any comments or suggestions from people about this. The people at wikibooks are very serious about promoting the Wikijunior project.

--Andrew Whitworth

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