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Nupedia is also o free collaborative encyclopedia, but uses rigourous peer review. Comparing Wikipedia and Nupedia, one can see that Wikipedia has articles on much more topics, while the quality is certainly comparable.

There was also this horrible incident, which I think caused a lot of confusion and might have taken away some of their momentum.

Well, Cliff,

There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.

While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.

For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.

Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.

For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.

For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.

The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)

Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.

Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.

Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.

Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"

Asking who is going to pay these editors and quality controllers is like asking who is going to pay the maintainers of free software. If GNU/Linux and all the free BSD variants didn't exist, you'd be justified in your skepticism.

But we already know this will work.

What about wikipedia? Well, here you have to judge for yourself. The review process is open and eternally ongoing. Being less rigorous, the quality of the final product is lower than Nupedia. But if you look through it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how good it really is.

14 new approved articles since 2000-07-25!!! At this rate Nupedia should start to be useful by the 3rd millenium.

While I agree that Wikipedia is similar to Everything2 in design but its articles are of higher quality, if you really want a "GNU FDL encyclopedia," Nupedia is a better example.

Well, my library could consist of:

- books from project gutenburg
- free books, maybe from here or here
- technical books like this one and other technical documents.
- articles from Nupedia
- university research papers, a lot of which are on-line now.
- mirrors of websites

All free, no fees. A prediction: a readable ebook will drive publishing toward free books just as linux is driving software companies to open source. It will never be a complete transformation in either case, but it will shake things up for sure.

Is there any relationship between Nupedia and GNUPedia? Are these simply two independent implementations of an idea whose time has come? If they are independent, will they merge or continue separately serving different goals?

Then go check out their reviewers in their categories. These people are usually college-level professors:

• Mathematics and Statistics
• Chemistry
• Archaeology

Not every category has reviewers yet, and some reviewers are bio-less, but this seems to be the direction that Nupedia is going.

Then go check out their reviewers in their categories. These people are usually college-level professors:

• Mathematics and Statistics
• Chemistry
• Archaeology

Not every category has reviewers yet, and some reviewers are bio-less, but this seems to be the direction that Nupedia is going.

Then go check out their reviewers in their categories. These people are usually college-level professors:

• Mathematics and Statistics
• Chemistry
• Archaeology

Not every category has reviewers yet, and some reviewers are bio-less, but this seems to be the direction that Nupedia is going.

Then go check out their reviewers in their categories. These people are usually college-level professors:

• Mathematics and Statistics
• Chemistry
• Archaeology

Not every category has reviewers yet, and some reviewers are bio-less, but this seems to be the direction that Nupedia is going.

what happens if some pages are erroneous, or even deceptive?
What happens if the title of the encyclopedia is deceptive? -- Nupedia, GNUpedia
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Nupedia has 2500 members and has worked really hard to put together an editorial/oversight framework that guarantees quality. Thus far, 5 short articles have worked their way through the system, and over 100 more are currently in process.

The main thing that is needed are volunteers ready and willing to make things happen. If you're like me, and not good enough of a programmer to contribute something back to the community in terms of software, here's your chance. Whatever you are an expert in, Nupedia needs your help.