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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."
Source code is available here:
https://github.com/wikireader
And who are also likely illiterate... problems problems.
Very unlikely. Most electronic assembly is done in China or Vietnam, both of which have 95% literacy rates.
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.'"
Why do people on slashdot feel the need to make points about things of which they have no information?
Here is some information: List of Countries by Literacy Rate
By default the list is sorted in alphabetical order, but you can click on the headers to sort by literacy rate, or by gender-specific literacy rate. Although illiteracy is correlated with poverty, it is even more strongly correlated with religion: Ten of the bottom ten are Muslim. Much of this is because they don't educate many of their girls.
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.