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I'm trying to get the small download from http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/wikipedia-for-schools.htm Download Schools Wikipedia Small ZIP Size: 830453083 bytes MD5: 05a6099928a11f1fb574525abed6a812 But I get a redirection instead... does anyone have a mirror?

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

the site has been updated and now has the torrent download link.

Download: a full download of the content should be available via BitTorrent by 23rd October. It is current being seeded.

Yep. And there's a editor-reviewed DVD derived from English Wikipedia that you are encouraged to download and spread far and wide.

Check out the SOS Children DVD distro. They checked it over for use in their own schools.

If you keep in mind how Wikipedia is written and that the website is a live working draft - like running CVS HEAD - you'll be fine. But of course many readers want to be able not to think when reading. (I bet they have fun on teh intarweb.)

The point here is really that it'll be checked by professional editors ... just like people keep asking for Wikipedia to do, but which of course is difficult to scale with wiki-style and -scale production.

Another example, for English Wikipedia, is the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection For Schools, where they took Wikipedia content to use in their own schools in third-world countries, and make sure their distro of it was good quality.

FWIW, this is something we hope to address slightly with the Flagged Revisions extension - see quality.wikimedia.org. The idea is that casual readers (not logged in) see the last not-obviously-awful version, and only logged-in readers see the live working draft. This is due to roll out on the German Wikipedia some time soonishishish, and other wikis (including English Wikipedia) sometime maybe later ishishish.

That doesn't address warranting that information is quality-checked and fact-checked over 2 million articles. We've yet to come up with a method that scales other than the present one. The Flagged Revisions extension can be adapted to this end, but someone has to be willing to do the work toward this.

So far the least worst approach has been hand-picking and checking articles, which has resulted in Wikipedia 0.5 and the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools (an interesting one - they used Wikipedia as raw material for an educational encyclopedia in their own schools). But these give you thousands of articles instead of millions. And one of Wikipedia's real strengths is its incredible breadth.

http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/wikipedia-for-schools.htm ./ers, spread the good news above to all elementary school children, teachers, parents, etc.

Problem solved.

Next? ;-)

(And please consider a donation this holiday season...:-))

I'm a high school computer teacher. I've let my students explore all kinds of topics in Wikipedia, and LEARN to CRITICALLY assess information! Imagine that!

But there is something for those who want a nice, safe, fixed encyclopedia (wikipedia):
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/wikipedia-for-schools.htm

So, ./ers, spread the word to all students/teachers/parents that you know.
(And like, perhaps, maybe, make a donation during this holiday season?)

Many, many good things have happened, continue to happen, and will continue to happen because of wikipedia.

Need wikipedia for school, children, etc.? Here's the solution! :-)

http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/wikipedia-for-schools.htm

Enjoy!

They should be careful for first grade, though - this is an adult encyclopedia, and we didn't censor it. If you take a look at things like Mozart's article (2nd paragraph), you'll see the kind of thing I mean - important to include in an adult release, but not what I'd want my second grade daughter reading! For young kids, I'd recommend the 2006 SOS Kids release. That has no browser, but every article should be kid-friendly.

Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is, after all.

As the article notes, hard science is a strong point for Wikipedia. If you are a troll, it's more fun to insert random flamage into the article on George W. Bush than it is to hack up the discussion of the Fourier Transform or something; and science geeks are more likely to be comfortable with computers than English teachers are. Another strong point of Wikipedia is pop culture. What's the name of Spiderman's secret identity? I don't know that the Encyclopedia Brittanica could even answer that one.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't perfect either. The biggest flaw: it costs money, while Wikipedia is free. If you value accuracy over all else, and don't mind the cost of Brittanica, of course Brittanica is the better choice. And if you are a University professor, the previous sentence probably describes you. But guess which one is more likely to be used in third-world classrooms. (If the teacher and the students have One Laptop Per Child laptop computers: Buy a USB flash drive for $30 at Fry's. Put a subset of Wikipedia on it. Plug it in to the teacher's laptop. Share it out over the wireless mesh. This will happen.)

My favorite part of the article: they had an expert check Wikipedia to see how good the information was. He spotted some minor errors... and couldn't resist fixing the errors!

The biggest question in my mind is: which approach is better, the "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, or a more restricted environment with hand-picked experts? Fortunately, this experiment is now being tried. We can wait and see whether one of the credentialed forks of Wikipedia turn out to be better, or if Wikipedia wins. And we can check them against each other!

steveha