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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 $20 per device, Aislinn Dewey and Victor Grigas (who works for Wikimedia) are trying to raise funds to buy up the company's inventory and ship WikiReaders to kids in places without Internet connectivity."
There is a good chance that those WikiReaders have probably been assembled by those same kids.
Source code is available here:
https://github.com/wikireader
I agree the English aspect is likely to limit its usefulness. Although it's getting somewhat more common for kids around the world to be able to read a bit of English.
There are, in any case, already large Wikipedia versions in some other languages, so they wouldn't have to be translated from scratch. And some of them overlap with languages widely spoken in countries with poor internet access, such as French and Spanish.
10 PRINT CHR$(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.
Apparently so - http://toddbot.blogspot.com/2010/05/wikireader-forth-and-hacking.html .. FORTH? Wow. Amusing. :)
That's a part of why I mentioned that I'd take five of these devices when the first listing of this article went by earlier today. I'd give a few out to friends but I'd keep something like that in my car or my bathroom to play with. Eventually I'd get bored and want to hack at it. Either way, I'm on board to buy five of them right now if they'll make them and sell them at that price. I'll even pay for ten of them and get five like the OLPC BOGO deal from the past.
I'd probably give three away and keep two so that I had one to keep as a backup for when I finally started hacking mine. I'd absolutely love a device like this. I know I can have the same thing on my phone and not even have to worry about updating it or the likes. That's hardly the point. As a stand-alone device I can think of lots of times when I'd refer to it, use it, or otherwise enjoy it to the point where I was getting far more than $20 value out of it. I think it would make a great gift item too.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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."
Not all kids in the world need vaccines (do yours?) some have vaccines & red cross already and don't want a lifetime of dependency. You realize that there is a range of wealth in the world, right? Some people are poor, but not starving.
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.