On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:11 PM, phoebe ayers <[email protected]> wrote: > But, to be fair, do we ask such questions of our other projects? I do > not recall being asked if I was a trained encyclopedia writer or a > trained journalist when I joined Wikimedia :) Perhaps we should ask > these kinds of hard questions of a new project, but also realize that > we may not be able to predict all of the answers ahead of time.
My first answer is that Wikipedia is good enough for children and that we do not need a Wikipedia fork with dumb language. If you think differently, please find or make relevant research which would prove your position. This type of project is original research per se. (Making an image, movie or educational game is OR. Making rules for language usage is POV and OR. Saying that Wikipedia is not good for children is POV and OR.) And we have to be extremely careful with any kind of original research. We have two opposing projects in way of handling OR: Wikinews, which handles it very well and Wikiversity, which doesn't. And if we are not able to drive well project with educational courses for adults, I can say that Wikijunior would be a disaster after just a couple of months of independent life. The problem with such projects is that they are usually a field for self-proclaimed experts to promote their ideological agenda. As it is about child education, it will be full of very stupid explanations, like that children are not able to understand this or that or that children mustn't hear something because it would kill them. > All of our projects have taken as their primary model some standard > type of work: the encyclopedia, the book of quotations, the dictionary > -- and then we have gone above and beyond any previous example of the > genre with each of our projects, through our technological and social > abilities. There is, similarly, lots of precedent in the world for > children's encyclopedias and reference works for children -- the need > and the model are both clearly present in the world -- and I think we > can fairly consider taking that type of work as a model for a new type > of wikimedia project, while expecting that we would similarly be able > to go above and beyond previous examples. Before we consider such project, they should prove that there is a particular value of creating such project, by giving scientific and not ideological explanations. Scientific field in this case is not any kind of librarian, programming or encyclopedic experience, but pedagogy. When you say that there are a lot of encyclopedias for children, I can say that I don't have anything against making an illustrated Wikipedia for children. As a static project. As all encyclopedias for children were and are. I don't have anything against supporting a project driven by professionals in pedagogy, too. However, I am fully against of creating a mass collaboration project for adults who think that they know what children want or what children are able to understand. This thread is a very good example of bunch of prejudices about children. In other words, ~50% of highly involved Wikimedians don't have any clue about that issue, while thinking that they have. This is not just bad, but dangerous. And it tells me that I shouldn't have any confidence in crowd sourcing of child encyclopedia. If something is so badly understood here, it will be much worse understood at the project level. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
