[Foundation-l] Simple Wikipedia: different projects

[Lodewijk]

2011/6/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

There are at least three serious issues in creation of such projects, if
> they are not defined strictly linguistically:
> * Scope. Which age do we cover, approximately? Any valid theory would be
> useful, but it should be defined. According to Piaget, less than 15 [in
> Northern France]; according to the age when we could be sure that child
> knows to read, more than 7 or 8. Which knowledge is appropriate for that
> range of age? What's appropriate for one 8-years old and what's
> appropriate for one 14-years old?
> <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>
>
<snip some very interesting remarks based on this age assumption>

I think you assume too quickly that only young people would benifit from
"simple" texts. In the Netherlands we have 1.5 million "low literate adults"
(people having trouble to read & write) and I think the Netherlands actually
is having quite low percentages in that field compared to many other
countries. These are not even people who speak Dutch as a secondary
language. Besides that there are indeed many children who might also benifit
from this content, and also non-natives (consider for example people from
Wallonia or Surinam (if non-native Dutch) who would like to look up
something in Dutch for some reason.

Now this easily scales towards many other languages. Sure, we could think
about all kind of complicated definitions, detailed scopes etc - but first I
would like to try and get an answer to the more fundamental question: would
we see benifit for such projects? Would we see a potential community to run
such projects?

The next question would be (independent of your definitions etc) whether
this would work best as a seperate project, or as a part of existing
projects (namespaces or Erik Zachte's solution - that is a rather technical
issue), and then if we would choose for the last, whether we would be
willing to invest into making this technically possible (there are several
challanges, such as how to resolve linking, searching etc). And then there
are many other questions to answer.

But... back to the original question: would you (yes, you who is reading
this. No, don't look behind you, I really mean you!) see benifit & community
potential for this? Are there people out there who would find it *fun* to
write articles in a simple way explaining the basics understandable for
everybody in simple language?

Best regards,

Lodewijk