Wikipedia For Schools DVD Released

David Gerard writes "SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."

Comments

14,000 not 6,000

[David Gerard]

Just after I submitted this, Andrew Cates from SOS Children's Villages corrected the hits on the site - it was actually 14,000 a day, not 6,000!

Re:14,000 not 6,000

[M1rth]

I've read this blog. I know how wikipedia works.

Or rather... how it doesn't work at all.

The worst thing you could do is feed the Wikipedia brand of nonsense to kids as "educational" material. Might as well give them a set of unshielded wires and an electric socket and tell them to learn about electricity. And it's not just the situations this Parker Peters describes above: you people fuck up on a pretty regular basis.

Well? I'm not comfortable knowing an "encyclopedia" infested with this kind of behavior is being given to kids as "educational" and "correct" learning material. How do you justify it?

Shouldn't that be a Wikipedia link?

[davidwr]

use by the Hole in the Wall education project

There, fixed that for you. Now someone go write the article.

Re:I find it interesting,

[LandDolphin]

I don't see why they wouldn't. The SOS people have verified the accuracy of the information versus a standard and it seems that this is being targeted towards schools is need. And while we all might agree that the schools in the US are in needs, it seems that this might be targeted towards schools in far more need then the US's.

wikislices on the XO -- how to choose the subset

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an obvious win for OLPC's XO laptop to also have a standalone chunk of wikipedia that kids can browse offline. Their wiki has some discussion on different approaches to selecting stuff for inclusion. One is to use article traffic statistics, but apparently that weighs too heavily toward pop-culture. Another method is to combine those stats with three other factors -- "Importance rating by WikiProject, Number of internal links into the page, Number of interwiki versions of the article (i.e., other language versions)."

They ship an English subset as an "activity", and I'm pretty sure they made a Spanish language subset for some of the country projects. I gather that they also intend to produce subject-area slices for Chemistry, Biology, and so on. Not sure if that has come to pass yet.

Re:I find it interesting,

[evilviper]

A wonderful article about how money doesnt=good education.

Oh?

"Once the parents spend over $600, the students do slightly better,"

And their costs for home school versus public schooling are highly lop-sided, not taking into consideration the cost of parent's time donated, subsidized meals, etc., etc.

Not to mention that home schooled students is a naturally self-selecting group... It doesn't follow that forcing everyone else to home school their children would give everyone equally good performance.

That article is a very small step up from a biased opinion piece.

Re:I find it interesting,

[M1rth]

when many schools wont allow research to be done on wikipedia itself which has the authority of the sources itself to back it

Actually, Wikipedia has:
- Cherry-picked sources
- Quotations taken out of context
- Redundantly sourced crap (sources that turn out later to have themselves been sourced from... wikipedia).
- NO way to fix any of these if an administrator or "consensus" of kooks sets up shop on a particular page and decides to edit-war en masse and proclaim that real, authoritative sources counter to their POV are "not reliable."

I encourage you to see how wikipedia really works. Spend a few hours reading the blog of a former Wikipedia administrator who saw how it was from the inside out.

Here's a great start.

Go on. I dare you. Read about the REAL wikipedia. And then realize that this horribly written stuff is going to be fed to schoolkids as an example of "researched" material.

You scared yet? I certainly am.

Re:Wikipedia fact?

[dvice_null]

> Didn't wikipedia just take a hit for being wildly inaccurate?

"The result was that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per article, while Britannica had about 3. However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's."
http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/12/15/1352207.shtml?tid=95&tid=14

Re:Wikipedia fact?

[butalearner]

Despite the fact that you are wrong, I trust Wikipedia more than most other sources of information. In fact, I would trust Wikipedia before some of the textbooks here in the US. Back in the small town I grew up in we were using really old textbooks in some classes. Of course we rarely got to the end of them, but we thought it pretty funny when we noticed Gerald Ford was the last President mentioned in one of our middle school history books (and this was mid-90's).

Further reading

[David Gerard]

Wikinews coverage.