[Olpc-open] A Wikipedia for Children.

[Barry Desborough]

Hello, I’m Barry Desborough, a retired teacher who taught in English primary and secondary schools. 

I have been trying, on and off, to get an idea off the ground. It is for a free, online, child-oriented encyclopedia. I have tried approaching Wikipedia itself, the Khan Academy and the California CK-12 initiative, and I have paid for and started to develop a  Wikispaces site "Wikidia dot net" to show how the idea works. Unfortunately, I was not able to rustle up enough contributors to be able to justify continuing to pay for the site, and for various reasons, the other sites are not a good match for the project idea.

What’s a child-oriented encyclopedia? It’s an encyclopedia that a child, on their own, may go to and navigate for themselves, to find age-appropriate educational content of interest to them. Pages should be brief, and as simple as possible for conveying the information. The pages should also be suitable for directed learners, and usable as teaching material by educators. Wikipedia content, as is used by the OLPC Digital Library, is not generated with the needs of children in mind. I have an old prototype of the idea still on the net at https://wikids.wikispaces.com/Index+1 <https://wikids.wikispaces.com/Index+1> which should give the general idea.

I am looking for a new home for this project, and it occurred to me that the OLPC might be able to host it, and encourage other contributions of suitable content, either from educators, or from children themselves, wiki-style. Generating content for it should provide a great motivational incentive for classes of pupils! There’s constructivism for you! All it would need would be a separate searchable wiki on the OLPC website. I would be happy to spend the rest of my retirement generating, curating and moderating content for such a wiki, and I would be willing to contribute a substantial (for me) sum in order to help get the thing started and keep it going.

With the cost and producing and distributing textbooks is so high, and in a world where teachers are unavailable or too expensive but cheap internet technology is becoming ever more accessible, I believe far more attention should be paid to providing accessible, high quality, appropriately pitched educational content.

Is there anyone on the list with the authority to pick this up, or has contacts with such people?

What are your thoughts on the idea?

Regards

Barry



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