[Foundation-l] Wikijunior - State of the Project

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Randy Wilson <xixtas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, the number of contributors and contributions has
> dropped to an alarming low over the past few months. Our ideal
> contributor would be someone with a background in children's
> education, or children working with adult assistance; so these are the
> kind of contributors we would like to reach out to. Private
> discussions with a few contributors have led me to believe that more
> primary educators would be willing to contribute and use Wikijunior
> except that the problems of vandalism and potentially incorrect
> content are difficult for them to get past. You see, here in the US a
> teacher could not only get fired for showing her class some of the
> things I've seen on a vandalized Wiki page, but could actually end up
> in jail. There is not a big problem with vandalism at Wikijunior and
> the Wikibooks admins are generally effective vandal fighters. Still,
> it has happened that there was a module vandalized with profanity
> stuck into the middle of a paragraph that stayed that way for more
> than four months.

The new flagged versions feature in Beta on de.wikipedia should help mitigate the visible
vandalism issue. But at the same time, the long delay between editing and seeing those edits in
the top/displayed version of an article will naturally be off-putting to new contributors to lower
traffic projects like WikiJunior. 
 
> The idea of creating a static site at Wikijunior.org has been
> discussed before. .... Here's one way that I
> think it could work effectively with a minimum of developer time:
> 
> 1) Wikijunior.org would run Mediawiki software and have the import
> function enabled from Wikibooks.
> 2) Wikijunior.org would have a stripped down default skin with larger
> fonts and no sidebar as its default. (See for example:
> http://www.mono-project.com.)
> 3) Administrators could change their skin to make the editing tools visible.
> 4) All modules on Wikijunior.org would be editable by administrators only.
> 5) Book development would continue on Wikibooks and be open to
> anonymous edits as it is now.
> 6) When a module was ready, it would be transwikied to the
> Wikijunior.org site by an administrator.
> 7) Each module would have a "contributing" link that would link back
> to the Wikijunior development site on Wikibooks.

I've supported this idea for some time now. It makes a great deal of sense for WikiJunior.
However, whether or not the foundation is the right ISP, I don't know. There might be legal
implications, since, as you say, choosing a single version of a module/book and pointing teachers
there is getting close to publishing in the 'might endanger Wikimedia's ISP protections' sense.
But IANAL.   

-- mav

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