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

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Aaron Adrignola
<aaron.adrignola at gmail.com> wrote:
> It may be relevant to note that http://wikijunior.org currently redirects
> to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior .
>
> From what I've heard, Wikijunior was supposed to become its own separate
> project at some point.  Now, that is Wikibooks-related and not
> Wikipedia-related, but if one were looking for a combined edition of all the
> projects in each language, for children, you've got the domain name there,
> owned by Wikimedia.
>
> -- Aaron Adrignola

:) excellent. I'd forgotten that we owned the wikijunior domain to go
along with the books.... I'd support a children's encyclopedia, and
argue that it's not quite the same thing as a simplified version:
presentation and content could be different for a project geared
towards kids, who are trying to learn about the world from the ground
up (versus someone who simply doesn't know the written language very
well). There is overlap of course in that any simple version would be
much better for kids than the current technical articles on a lot of
projects.

One argument in favor of a new children's encyclopedia -- maybe in
fact integrated set of projects for children, books and all -- is that
it would set some scope on the new project and give it a purpose that
Simple English has always struggled a bit with finding. No, you don't
need new admins, but a new project might attract new contributors
(teachers, etc) who have never edited Wikipedia before.

If starting a whole new project is too hard, starting a prominent
portal on each language site with links to these simplified articles
-- maybe with the articles as subpages -- could be a nice solution.

-- phoebe

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