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

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:11 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> But, to be fair, do we ask such questions of our other projects? I do
> not recall being asked if I was a trained encyclopedia writer or a
> trained journalist when I joined Wikimedia :) Perhaps we should ask
> these kinds of hard questions of a new project, but also realize that
> we may not be able to predict all of the answers ahead of time.

My first answer is that Wikipedia is good enough for children and that
we do not need a Wikipedia fork with dumb language. If you think
differently, please find or make relevant research which would prove
your position.

This type of project is original research per se. (Making an image,
movie or educational game is OR. Making rules for language usage is
POV and OR. Saying that Wikipedia is not good for children is POV and
OR.) And we have to be extremely careful with any kind of original
research. We have two opposing projects in way of handling OR:
Wikinews, which handles it very well and Wikiversity, which doesn't.
And if we are not able to drive well project with educational courses
for adults, I can say that Wikijunior would be a disaster after just a
couple of months of independent life.

The problem with such projects is that they are usually a field for
self-proclaimed experts to promote their ideological agenda. As it is
about child education, it will be full of very stupid explanations,
like that children are not able to understand this or that or that
children mustn't hear something because it would kill them.

> All of our projects have taken as their primary model some standard
> type of work: the encyclopedia, the book of quotations, the dictionary
> -- and then we have gone above and beyond any previous example of the
> genre with each of our projects, through our technological and social
> abilities. There is, similarly, lots of precedent in the world for
> children's encyclopedias and reference works for children -- the need
> and the model are both clearly present in the world -- and I think we
> can fairly consider taking that type of work as a model for a new type
> of wikimedia project, while expecting that we would similarly be able
> to go above and beyond previous examples.

Before we consider such project, they should prove that there is a
particular value of creating such project, by giving scientific and
not ideological explanations. Scientific field in this case is not any
kind of librarian, programming or encyclopedic experience, but
pedagogy.

When you say that there are a lot of encyclopedias for children, I can
say that I don't have anything against making an illustrated Wikipedia
for children. As a static project. As all encyclopedias for children
were and are. I don't have anything against supporting a project
driven by professionals in pedagogy, too.

However, I am fully against of creating a mass collaboration project
for adults who think that they know what children want or what
children are able to understand. This thread is a very good example of
bunch of prejudices about children. In other words, ~50% of highly
involved Wikimedians don't have any clue about that issue, while
thinking that they have. This is not just bad, but dangerous. And it
tells me that I shouldn't have any confidence in crowd sourcing of
child encyclopedia. If something is so badly understood here, it will
be much worse understood at the project level.