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Campaign Raises Funds To Send Wikipedia Readers To Kids Without Internet
Eloquence writes "Remember the WikiReader? It was pitched as a device that would contain the text of the entire English Wikipedia, and run on two AAA batteries for months. Unfortunately it was sold to the wrong audience: people who already have smartphones, tablets and laptops. At a cost of $20 per device, Aislinn Dewey and Victor Grigas (who works for Wikimedia) are trying to raise funds to buy up the company's inventory and ship WikiReaders to kids in places without Internet connectivity."
.. aren't they opening up the software stack on it too?
I bet some of those same kids would hack at the software. It's a general purpose computer, after all, just running an ugly looking renderer.
There is a good chance that those WikiReaders have probably been assembled by those same kids.
I found an interesting video on this item : Wikireader
Still too expensive IMHO
They're $10 on Amazon (instead of $20) - can I ship some directly to them? There seem to be a bunch for that price:
http://goo.gl/XfHfX
Yes, this is exactly what kids need in third-world countries! I mean, sure they don't speak English, live a subsistence life, don't have easy access to batteries and cannot read their native language, let alone English. Yes this is the perfect idea.
Not a bad idea, but it may suffer the same fate as OLPC. Namely, too much focus given to the hardware and not enough on the software.
Most English speaking countries are developed enough that internet access is "no big deal" for most of the population. A full translation of wiki into some other languages would be considerably more useful, but would involve a lot more "man hours" to develop.
Edit: I RTFA and I can't fault the premise of the idea - they are buying up already-manufactured units at firesale prices, apparently - I guess the "extremely cheap" nature of the project outweighs any potential downsides. Starting from scratch, multi-lingual devices would probably be the way to go.
I'm sure they would much prefer a sandwich though.
Now, even poor kids can be fed the same propaganda as the rich ones, such as the Holocaust article, which doesn't as much as *mention* the fact that many question the very occurrence, or at least have very strong doubts about the official story and numbers. Everything is stated as facts on Wikipedia, as long as "somebody else we like said it".
That's just one example, though. Wikipedia is one rotten project. I gave up trying to contribute at all many years ago due how you get harassed if you aren't "a regular".
There has already been experiments that show that this is a good idea. Children given access to computers/knowledge WILL learn and exceed expectations. http://www.npr.org/2013/05/03/179828483/can-schools-exist-in-the-cloud
Wikipedia? Its fully of bad information and false information. Why? Because there is no standard to it and anyone can make changes on it or submit information.
Its ok to use it as a guideline but only a complete moron would take it all as 100% fact.
When I just need some text from wikipedia, I pick up the wikireader and stab at it and lo, I get it very quickly. I also have wiktionary installed so it does that as well. And I own a mobile phone with wifi and multitouch, so I could use full wikipedia. I can get results from my wikireader while I'm still waiting for the browser to load, in little more time than it takes to wake my phone up and unlock it. It's far and away faster than waking up a netbook and doing the same thing, since the ones I'm using now lack SSD...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can i create my own on a e-ink reader? While a great idea for areas of the world, i do have internet and would like a larger screen.
If its more than one volume, they could be easily shared between different kids.
It will have high density pictures.
It will work without any batteries.
It will much easier to read than the device.
They are already available in many languages.
This is based around a fail product, that nobody wanted.
The manufacturer is burned by having a large inventory
and cannot move them.
Someone comes up with the idea to raise money from people
to buy out the inventory so the manufacturer gets in the black
on the project.
In the end, X amounts of units (hopefully) shipped to places
in the world where english is not the language, batteries
are expensive and hard to get (solar power anyone??
Thanks asshole. Now I have to have a conversation with my son that I didn't want to have :(
I only just found out about the WikiReader a few months ago, and added it to my Amazon cart - a few weeks ago they dropped to $10 each, so i bought 4 and am very impressed. I'm now learning Fourth so I can write some programs for it.
http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia/dp/B002N5521W
lead to 'cleaner eulogies to BSD's you are aE screaming believe their OS don't fear the to use the GNAA elected, we took GNAA on slashdot,
have you checked the prices on encyclopedias, like, ever? never mind one in swahili.
do you have any kind of idea how fucking much shipping them would cost?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Link it to http://www.h2g2.com/ and put Don't Panic! in large friendly letters on the cover.
They take a snapshot at some point in time, right? What if kids get a snapshot which has all the wrong information, or after a super-delete purge of all the interesting articles happens because they're not notable?
At a cost of $20 per device, Aislinn Dewey and Victor Grigas (who works for Wikimedia) are trying to raise funds to buy up the company's inventory and ship WikiReaders to kids in places without Internet connectivity.
Will the reader stand up to the physical abuse it will receive?
Rapid attrition translates into much higher costs and limited availability. I don't altogether trust the geek's affection for dirt-cheap gadgets,
Is the Wikipedia written at a grade school reading level?
How closely is the English language Wikipedia tied to the third world curricula and classroom?
Significant deployments of the OLPC laptop are almost unknown outside of Hispanic speaking Central and South America.
There has to be a reason for that --- and the most likely place to begin searching for an answer lies in the cultural biases of the Western donor.
John Wood, founder of Room to Read, emphasizes affordability and scalability over high-tech solutions. While in favor of the One Laptop per Child initiative for providing education to children in the developing world at a cheaper rate, he has pointed out that a $2,000 library can serve 400 children, costing just $5 a child to bring access to a wide range of books in the local languages (such as Khmer or Nepali) and English; also, a $10,000 school can serve 400---500 children ($20---$25 a child). According to Wood, these are more appropriate solutions for education in the dense forests of Vietnam or rural Cambodia. [2006]
One Laptop per Child
The need for a wide range of books can't be emphasized enough.
Instead of sending someone there to read wikipedia to them, in a language they don't speak, they should just put it on some sort of eReader, and then they can not read it, because they don't know english.
Since wikipedia is open source you just ship one and allow free copying. Either electronically or manually.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Do these wikireaders display graphics? If so, kids are in for a treat of both real pictures and hand-drawn illustrations at the above links.
By the way, for an hour and a half yesterday, the world thought that Orville Redenbacher died of autoerotic asphyxiation. 08:47, 5 May 2013 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Orville_Redenbacher&diff=553623706&oldid=552899374 (anon edit) 10:13, 5 May 2013 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Orville_Redenbacher&diff=553632261&oldid=553623706 (reversed)
We designed on paper with the help of a flowchart stencil, then wrote our code longhand on special forms, testing by reading, before handing them to a punch-card operator, who turned them into instruction cards with holes punched out in the correct sequence, ready to be fed into the computer. If you dropped that stack of cards it was a royal pita to get them back in order.
...if you allow that the inaccuracies which do appear rarely stay there for long and vandalism is often repaired within 5 minutes.
Better to market it to english teachers; i can't see ESL students using it---ever. If it were wikipedia in their native language, absolutely. I just can't think of a scenario where an ESL student would stop and say "hey, I want to read a probably difficult article on a subject in a foreign language." But if, say, one (1!), were available to a school for the english department to use instead of the student population, I could see teachers using it effectively. Meaning one per school, most likely (and one per high school at that). Keep costs low, and expectations similarly.
Now, if you were to make a similar device in students' native language, they would probably eat that up. But we're talking english as a foreign language here, and students just won't do that kind of thing.