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

[David Gerard]

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.

Re:14,000 not 6,000

[Cassius Corodes]

Your post is non-NPV, and uses blogs as sources. Please edit the PV, and find Verifiable sources or it will be reverted.

Re:14,000 not 6,000

[lysergic.acid]

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:

• the most common type are the casual internet surfer. they take everything at face value and make no distinction between a blog post and an edited news article. to them truth is whatever they read (first).
• then there are the Wikipedia skeptics. if it's not written by a traditional paid publication, they don't trust it. in reality they're not much more discerning than the casual user; they just accept what the Mainstream Media says/prints at face value. to them truth is what the Washington Post/Britannica/CNN/Newsweek says it is.
• lastly, there are the media omnivores. they get their information from a wide variety of sources--professional/personal blogs, independent media, social news aggregators(Slashdot, digg, del.ico.us, etc.), Reuters/BBC/The New Yorker/etc., science journals, academic publications, and anything else that comes along (e.g. ArsTechnica, New Scientist, Answers.com/Wikipedia/Britannica, etc.). they will generally get their information from a wide variety of media sources to account for the inherent biases of each source. they also understand how Wikipedia works and follow the citation links to verify the info they read. being more astute media consumers, they actually try to make an effort to dig deeper rather than taking what they read at face value--regardless of whether it's Britannica, Wikipedia, or Joe Schmoe's blog.

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.

I find it interesting,

[pwnies]

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.

Re:I find it interesting,

[Conception]

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.

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:I find it interesting,

[owlnation]

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.

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.

Re:I find it interesting,

[David Gerard]

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.

Re:Wikipedia fact?

[DragonWriter]

Didn't wikipedia just take a hit for being wildly inaccurate? I know it says they've been "checked", but checked by who? I guess its just more evidence that Americas public schools are going to just get more stupid.

SOS Children's Villages schools are not public schools nor are they, generally, America's.

Talk about "wildly inaccurate"!

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?

[dvice_null]

> 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

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.

When is wikipedia going to stop being a cult of

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:When is wikipedia going to stop being a cult of

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Wikipedia fact?

[mattb112885]

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.