Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That schools will use this, which has no sources cited on the pages themselves, no list of authors who contributed, no history, and only the backing of the SOS peeps; when many schools wont allow research to be done on wikipedia itself which has the authority of the sources itself to back it. Odd.
use by the Hole in the Wall education project
There, fixed that for you. Now someone go write the article.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd love to see more sites online that do something like this SOS edition did. That is, a mirrored subset of Wikipedia, with every page in the mirror checked and maybe corrected by its host. That way, people can check with their preferred authority(ies) whether to accept what they see in "the" Wikipedia. While leaving Wikipedia itself standalone, "caveat emptor", for anyone to check on their own the usual ways.
A really good implementation would link from the "master" Wikipedia out to each "approving" site's copy of it. And a really good system would incorporate quality revisions in the downstream sites back upstream to the master Wikipedia.
This SOS edition is a step in that direction.
--
make install -not war
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.
SOS Children's Villages schools are not public schools nor are they, generally, America's.
Talk about "wildly inaccurate"!
> 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
> Didn't wikipedia just take a hit for being wildly inaccurate?
"Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296.html
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).
Wikinews coverage.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
notabillity and actually include articles that people actually want. Wikipedia claims to be combatting systemic bias but deletes articles as "not notable" because their deletionists admins don't like it.
For example it has the South Park episode about Tourettes Syndrome but does not have an article about Tourettes Guy despite having 221,000 hits on Google.
Also it censors fan's of YuGiOh the abridged series yet has has about 24 articles about the video games. Use Google Knol instead, it dosen't have notabillity policies.
Yes, I found it funny in Middle School how our social studies book claimed that Venezuela would run out of oil... in 1980. And I was in middle school in 1992. At least Wikipedia is usually more up-to-date than that.
Dude, on standardized tests, 50% is the mean, by definition. The test result is them telling you where you fall in the 100 control group students.
I have a BS in math. The mean score of public school children on standardized tests is 50%.
Or do you seriously believe that the article was trying to say that public school students average a 50% score on their schoolwork, thus the average student fails?
I agree. You rarely see that kind of bullshit on science/mathematics articles. Mostly because editors are passionate about the topic, but ultimately disinterested. Hell, my senior Mathematics thesis was cited by several articles (accurately, though they were eventually removed). I didn't mention that because I'm proud of it (though it is kind of neat), but because I don't particularly care that I'm not cited anymore. Big whoop, the article's tone/focus changed and my work became less relevant than other sources (they were citing some of my definitions in a few articles -- however, those are only used in a relatively specialized field, more specialized than the articles specifically).
There is a clear institutional flaw on "the other side" of Wikipedia, where anybody with an opinion can and does post. It's a shame -- academia is much better in this regard. In academia, a degree gets your foot in the door. There are other ways to do it, but they are pretty rare in practice. But no matter what, every substantive thing you say is subject to debate, in public. Indeed, often in the same forum as the original article. Not behind a "Talk Page" that is "behind" the sanctioned opinion of the day.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Wikipedia is an excellent springboard for research. While citing Wikipedia itself is a major no-no for a few reasons (A, the content of the website can change, rendering your quotation non-existent, and B, you'll be laughed out of the room by your professor/review board/whatever), you can read Wikipedia's references, verify that they say what Wikipedia says they said, and then cite that source in your paper. Voila!
Wikipedia might not be a credible source, but it cites credible sources. Use Wikipedia to find credible sources, and then cite those.