[Wikimedia-l] Children and Simple English

[Mathias Damour]

Le 30/05/2013 15:28, Sarah Stierch a écrit :
> No clue. I generally "translate" my articles in English to it and go about my business. We'd have to ask around.

Whereas children are included as Simple English Wikipedia (SEWP) 
expected audience, repeated discussions [1] show that this project has 
generally been quite ambiguous about being designed for children. It 
does have valuable content that fit better to children than the standard 
English Wikipedia, but is hardly put forward as an encyclopedia for 
children.

Search engines and the most used one certainly reflects this 
uncertainty. The query 
http://www.google.com/search?q=Encyclopedia_for_children gets 
kids.britannica.com, some paper encyclopedia on amazon.com and some 
mirror sites of the standard english Wikipedia displayed as "for 
children", but SEWP doesn't show up.

Hence the Wikikids proposal !
Our clue on fr.vikidia.org (one of the existing Wikikids-like project) 
on it being actually used by children is the numerous messages they drop 
on the Guestbook when invited to write "what they think of Vikidia" by a 
sitenotice : http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Vikidia:Livre_d%27or : Many 
thanks and enthusiasm ! :-)
The only sad thing is that it won't be launched in other languages (and 
as a WM sister project) without your help and support (to fix the 
proposal, ask questions, write a RFC...)

See :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids
just set down : 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikids/Relation_to_Simple_English_Wikipedia

[1] 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Simple_English_Wikipedia_(2)

> On May 30, 2013, at 2:49 AM, Daniel Mietchen <daniel.mietchen at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Sarah,
>>
>> that sounds like an important milestone!
>> Do we have any feedback as to how Simple is actually used by "children
>> and adults learning how to speak English"?
>>
>> Daniel

-- 
Mathias Damour
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