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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."
Well, when your choices are no education and free but perhaps not perfectly accurate education, I think most of the world's poor would choose the latter for their children.
SOS Children's Villages schools are not public schools nor are they, generally, America's.
Talk about "wildly inaccurate"!
To be fair, the Schools Wikipedia will be gaining popularity from being a Wikipedia distro, whereas Citizendium is a separate project. One that's proceeding quite well and methodically. Despite some personality clashes, Wikipedia and CZ are fundamentally on the same side: to make good, free educational content available to the world. Everyone wins.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If the children are taught critical thinking, they will be aware that any source has the possibility of errors, just as any theory may be improved or disproved.
Yes, but who are SOS? They are a charity and an NGO. While I'm not accusing them of anything, generally speaking, charities and NGOs raise funds by pushing an agenda. Fear and/or guilt = cash. They are, generally speaking, not objective sources, and as such should not be trusted. If they verified the information, why are they not then publishing those sources with it? They've done all the work.
Sorry, but this does not seem to be all it appears to be.
Yes. The scary thing about Wikipedia is that once you understand the process, and then start looking into what constitutes a "reliable source," you start realising how bad the other "reliable references" actually are.
The answer, of course, is: there is no substitute for thinking while reading, and nothing is safe to spoonfeed from.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If the people who wrote Wikipedia were taught critical thinking, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Truthy, not true. Odd no, manipulated yes. As pointed out above, two random anonymous guys from Wikipedia disproved the research. If you trust that, you are the wikipedia target market.
P.S. I have some amazing Nevada seafront property for sale at a bargain price, interested?
I don't think you can compare the YuGiOh parody youtube series, darling of TV Tropes though it may be, with the multi-million selling series of videogames that spawned that cartoon that spawned the dub that spawned said parody, and say that both are obviously worthy of inclusion. Likewise a South Park episode which provoked media commentary, broadcaster censorship, and a statement from Tourettes' organisations is surely in a different ballpark from a Youtube video whose only discernable public reaction is people talking about it on bebo and web forums (going by that Google search you cite).
At any rate, I think we'll both agree that "it has a lot of google hits" is a moronic criterion for a subject's worthiness of mention, and moronic inclusion/exclusion criteria are what Wikipedia sorely needs to deal with. My rule of thumb is how much has been said about a subject. I mean, if there are 400 newspaper articles discussing the Humanist Alliance's bus advertisements, there's probably going to be more "meat" there to convey to the reader than 200,000 Youtube comments pages and web forum posts. However Wikipedia's policies have grown rather ad hoc rather than having any rules like this and it really needs a stronger, sent-from-above statement in terms of what it will include. It's sad but until someone says "Wikipedia will have articles that meet X, Y, and Z", everyone is going to argue it's unfair, and clearly (going by the sort of "Wikinazis" commentary on the go) nobody is actually willing to sit down and hammer out these rules as a community. (Arguably that last point stems from people's assumption that Wikipedia editing can be performed without engaging with debate with actual human beings, but that's a whole nother argument.)
you seem a little confused.
there's nothing wrong with getting your info from Wikipedia if you understand the nature of your media source. there are several different approaches to Wikipedia info, but they primarily fall into 3 groups:
if you're not a discerning person, it doesn't matter whether you get your info from Britannica or Wikipedia, both have about the same level of accuracy, though Wikipedia generally has fewer errors by volume. despite the air of superiority they put on, group #2 is simply deluding themselves by attributing a false sense of accuracy to commercial publications while dismissing collaborative editing off-hand. group #3 is at least objective enough to recognize that all media sources have errors and biases because their authors are all human. by accessing a diverse range of media sources and verifying published information, they have an easier time obtaining accurate info and are less susceptible to misinformation.
That's because he wrote them.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Note that you could say exactly the same thing with the word "Wikipedia" replaced with any encyclopedia.
the content of the website can change
No it can't, not if you cite properly and link to the static version.