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Wikipedia For Schools DVD Released

Posted by timothy on from the nothing-naughty dept.

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."

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I find it interesting, by M1rth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
  2. Re:Wikipedia fact? by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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