[Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia"

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:39 AM, Noein <pronoein at gmail.com> wrote:
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> I don't know if wikipedia should have a chapter specific to children
> because it would be culturally biased by our views about education.

I think you mean 'project' rather than 'chapter'
My view of a kids' encyclopedia is: this is a popular type of
reference work, with dozens of examples in the print world, some very
popular.  There are also a number of wiki-versions of the same we can
learn from.  We don't need to overthink this, we can just try it out
and see how it works.  Trying new things should be no big deal.


> - - for the non-semantic persons (who don't rely much on words), more
> direct images (or photos) and animations (or videos). For example
> explaining the size of the sun and of planets showing their relative
> size works better than sheer numbers for most of people, or at least is
> a necessary intermediate step for understanding the numbers.

These are great ideas.  Whether they should be on their own separate
Project, or provided as 'flavors' of articles on existing projects, is
a separate question.

Articles that center around visual and media descriptions are fun for
all sorts of readers.  (likewise visual dictionaries).

> - - for people not fluent with vocabulary, use only the 500 (200? 1000?)
> most common english words (a bot could signal rare words)

There could also be hovertext with explanations for words not in that
list of 1000.

> - - replace complex equations with qualitative explanations

Not necessarily replace, but use qualitative explanations (like good
popular science works) with equations provided for those who are
interested.  Deep technical details could be provided in footnotes,
perhaps with a standard link to the right section of a more complex
article (on normal Wikipedia, or in a specialist reference).

> Also, for illiterate persons, it would be great to include a "play" button

Yes!   Text to speech is already good enough for this in a few languages.
And we can give much more prominence to 'spoken Wikipedia' resources,
which many more people would contribute to if it were highlighted.


SJ