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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 $20 per device, Aislinn Dewey and Victor Grigas (who works for Wikimedia) are trying to raise funds to buy up the company's inventory and ship WikiReaders to kids in places without Internet connectivity."
.. aren't they opening up the software stack on it too?
I bet some of those same kids would hack at the software. It's a general purpose computer, after all, just running an ugly looking renderer.
There is a good chance that those WikiReaders have probably been assembled by those same kids.
I agree the English aspect is likely to limit its usefulness. Although it's getting somewhat more common for kids around the world to be able to read a bit of English.
There are, in any case, already large Wikipedia versions in some other languages, so they wouldn't have to be translated from scratch. And some of them overlap with languages widely spoken in countries with poor internet access, such as French and Spanish.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
Hi! when we contacted the manufacturer, he said that any language version thats already available for the WikiReader will be able to be pre-installed, There's several available: http://dev.thewikireader.com/language-packs/ he was interested in putting effort into getting any other languages needed as well, including one developed by the UK specifically for classroom education: http://schools-wikipedia.org/
And some of them overlap with languages widely spoken in countries with poor internet access, such as French and Spanish.
True, but to avoid any misunderstanding it's probably best to point out that some areas of France are quite well developed - in Paris you could easily think you were in a modern country.
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.'"
they don't speak English
Wikipedia is available in many languages besides English.
live a subsistence life
People don't choose to live a subsistence life. Information technology can give them other options. Few things have changed life in poor countries more than cellphones. Farmers can check global or regional prices, and know if a village cartel of buyers is ripping them off. They can get information about the weather, crop diseases, fertilizer usage, etc.
don't have easy access to batteries
Batteries are available anywhere, and there is a single global standard. A rechargable AAA battery is good for 500 cycles at a cost of less than a cent per cycle.
cannot read their native language, let alone English.
Literacy rates are only roughly correlated with poverty. There are some very poor places with surprising high literacy rates.
Yes this is the perfect idea.
People made the same sarcastic, cynical statements about cellphones a decade ago. I guess criticizing others helps them rationalize their own inaction.
actually in most intelligent circles to consider something as TRUTH (about an event) it takes N independent sources (where N is greater than 3 in most cases).
Wikipedia is good for 3 things mostly
1 to get the keywords on a subject
2 to get a quick "dance through" a subject
3 REFERENCES (you know that buncha links at the bottom??)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
or gingerbread
rewriting history since 2109
I had in mind mostly these French speakers, but point taken. :P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
People don't choose to live a subsistence life.
Not true, in many cultures people DO choose a subsistence life style. For a variety of reasons.
Its not common in the US, other than Alaska. But northern Canada and parts of Norway, Russia, South Pacific, and South America all have cultures that choose a subsistence life style.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Thanks asshole. Now I have to have a conversation with my son that I didn't want to have :(
"I wanted to buy a cheapo device so now I had to look at the goatse guy?"? did you at least tell him about tubgirl and a movie featuring a certain cup..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
LOL Now that was clever. Anyhow, thanks OP for the post. I think I'm going to grab one to play with. I'd have to donate $250 to get one through the link in the summary. Actually, I'm going to get two of them at that price.
It makes me wonder if maybe these folks are scamming?
They say, in the video, that they contacted the manufacturer and that they would be able to get them in bulk for $25 with a "maybe less" caveat.
The company, themselves it appears, sell that same device for $10 on Amazon and that is buying them one at a time, not in bulk. It would likely be less than $10 if they were buying them in bulk.
So why are the prices so different? It makes me wonder if they're scamming. It would be unfortunate if they were.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Exactly. People who dismiss Wikipedia because of its inaccuracies often forget about what we usually did *before* Wikipedia existed: We made stuff up based on our intuitions, *maybe* talked about it at a coffee shop with a small number of our friends, and believed it as fact. Sure, if we were doing academic research, we were more rigorous (and that's improved, too, IMHO), but how often did that happen? Now, with portable devices that can access the WWW, our first reponse when we're not sure about something is often to look it up.
I can't emphasize this enough: Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.
So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.
And, in order to leave a public comment on the donation site you have to have made a donation.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The link is a legitimate link and a valuable link. You really can buy them for $10 on Amazon - new. This whole thing is starting to reek of a scam or, at least, a waste of money. They'd be paying $15 more for the product than they'd be able to buy it for on Amazon if what they're claiming is true. Amazon has free two day shipping (IIRC) on the product. They'd get more for just collecting the money and then sending the people gift cards for the ten bucks so that they could order their own. They'd get 2.5 products instead of one if they did it that way and they'd get free shipping to boot.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why are you paying 2.5 times the price for the same device listed on Amazon?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
Since wikipedia is open source you just ship one and allow free copying. Either electronically or manually.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I agree the English aspect is likely to limit its usefulness. Although it's getting somewhat more common for kids around the world to be able to read a bit of English.
There are, in any case, already large Wikipedia versions in some other languages, so they wouldn't have to be translated from scratch. And some of them overlap with languages widely spoken in countries with poor internet access, such as French and Spanish.
A bigger limit to the usefulness is the amount of inaccurate information on Wikipedia. While the concept is great, there is a lot to be desired given the implimentation.
don't have easy access to batteries
Batteries are available anywhere, and there is a single global standard. A rechargable AAA battery is good for 500 cycles at a cost of less than a cent per cycle.
Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.
I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.
People made the same sarcastic, cynical statements about cellphones a decade ago. I guess criticizing others helps them rationalize their own inaction.
To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.
They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.
But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Hi guys - Victor Grigas here (im the guy in the video), we plan to buy whatever is most cost effective, if they come from amazon or the manufacturer - in each case there are technical considerations. The $25 is a ballpark estimate. The benefits from the manufacturer are that he will pre load whichever language we need and that the microSD card can be 8gb. I found out about this by shopping on amazon myself for one (for like $15 a month ago) and when i got it it had a 4gb card with a 3 year old copy of .en wikipedia and i had to go purchase a larger microSD card just to fit the current (october 2012) version of .en wikipedia on my device. This represents a significant problem not only in extra expense of microSD cards but all the time it takes to unwrap packaging, and update each card. However, if the campaign only gets a few thousand dollars I think that would be the most effective option because that means more wikireaders (and i wouldnt mind spending a few weekends updating cards) Also I don't know about amazons' supersaver shipping to places outside the USA. Thanks everyone for your strong criticism, I genuinely appreciate it because it helps find the best options. Please let us know if there are inefficiencies or other things we can do. Also keep in mind Aislinn and I are not making any money on this at all. We plan to publish all our transactions and be as transparent as possible about this. Hell, if i was looking at this from the outside I'd demand that. Thanks for reading.
Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.
So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.
Unless you are reading a subject which is "owned" by one individual, who furiously defends it against changes they don't agree with. You don't even have to get to an obscure subject to find this, just a non-controversial subject that might not be that much fun to write about for most people. If you come across this, it isn't groupthink- it is just people "making stuff up".
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I already did the hack to the wikireader a few years ago.
https://sites.google.com/site/sporkinum/
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.
I'm not quite clear on the above -- do you mean that:
A. it would be more reasonable to wait years for the telecom infrastructure to become available and then go straight to Internet-capable devices (as opposed to offline devices right away)
B. Internet-capable devices are preloaded (e.g. with Wikipedia), so it's better to get them now as it will eventually be possible to fully utilize their abilities, as opposed to spending on a wave of offline devices followed by online ones
C. Internet-capable devices aren't preloaded, but better to get them for the features they do have as they'll be more useful down the road
I defer to your experience, but was wondering because in cases A & C, it seems to me like any substantial delay would harm the educational & skills development of the kids left waiting, and "A" would result in some kids reaching adulthood without getting their chance.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
In a way. If you don't mind ordering a ton of them, various manufacturers will brand and often allow you to customize software for a variety of products, e-ink readers included.
A quick search turns up a few manufactures with e-ink reader products for you to brand and/or otherwise customize: Tomstar, Sim-Tek, APEC, Win-Win, Penel, and a host of others. Products vary, though a quick check shows at least one with a 9.7" display.
Not exactly DIY, but a pretty cheap option (well under 100k) if you really need to have your "own" product.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
So you basic point is... "I don't have to sit around in coffee shops and guess at stuff anymore because now with the internet, anonymous people will do that for me." Clever.
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)
If it is at all political, historical or religious, ... people are highly biased one way or the other about it and anything read has to be read with a grain of salt.
There; FTFY. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
I'm not quite clear on the above -- do you mean that:
A. it would be more reasonable to wait years for the telecom infrastructure to become available and then go straight to Internet-capable devices (as opposed to offline devices right away)
B. Internet-capable devices are preloaded (e.g. with Wikipedia), so it's better to get them now as it will eventually be possible to fully utilize their abilities, as opposed to spending on a wave of offline devices followed by online ones
C. Internet-capable devices aren't preloaded, but better to get them for the features they do have as they'll be more useful down the road
I defer to your experience, but was wondering because in cases A & C, it seems to me like any substantial delay would harm the educational & skills development of the kids left waiting, and "A" would result in some kids reaching adulthood without getting their chance.
I like B most, with C as a viable option if B isn't possible.
But emphatically: No, I don't ever advise waiting. What I meant to say is that when someone comes to me with a proposal like this (i.e. to give offline wikipedia devices to students) I suggest that they push harder to get internet into their target schools as well. In my experience, having internet connectivity makes computers many times more attractive to people of all ages in the developing world. Besides, a VSAT dish with generating capacity and a wireless network isn't asking for the moon. It's expensive by local standards, yes, but that's what donor money is for. :-)
The thing that drives me craziest in this job is when people see technology as a kind of either/or thing. You either have exactly the same infrastructure as you would in a downtown office in New York, or you have nothing. This idea is kind of a modulation on that problem, where instead of viewing the world in a binary mode, they've simply misjudged the distance of the steps between.
... In my decidedly less than humble opinion, of course.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
...if you allow that the inaccuracies which do appear rarely stay there for long and vandalism is often repaired within 5 minutes.