Seth, I welcome any input, on or off-list and thanks for the encouragement. I'm reasonably tech-savvy for someone trained as a molecular biologist, but I must admit being a wiki-newbie, so I would certainly encourage you or anyone else to jump right in and edit the Animal health pages for content, structure or style.
I've started by trying to articulate the idea and it's potential and the result is admittedly too wordy and a little bit stream-of-consciousness. I've made some further edits along the lines of your suggestion. If it will make it easier for others to jump in and make contributions to this effort, I'm entirely in favor of any edits that the list would like to make to the wiki. There is far too much for one person to do, particularly this volunteer. I was intrigued by Javier's mention of a large agriculture-related library relevant to the Andean region and it would be great if some of that material could be incorporated into the Animal health content development effort. While I'm writing to the list, I'd like to mention that I've been struggling a bit with a concept that is not really laid out on the OLPC wiki to any great extent. While Localization and Internalization are concepts that are clearly spelled out, they are focused on language and re-use of code and content. There is a somewhat related concept (let's call it Regionalization) that I have not seen not clearly discussed on the OLPC wiki. While a univeral and localized core of content in humanities and primary school subjects (math, geography, etc.) can be expected to be valuable without regard to the original language or homeland of the author/developer; certain types of health-specific content (in particular, locally relevant public health messages) will only be of value if developed with a specific region's challenges in mind, thus Regionalization. For example, hand-washing, clean water, proper food handling practices, and even mosquito netting and/or eradication are in essence universally useful and important public health messages to deliver; but knowing that kissing bugs transmit Chagas disease is really only directly relevant to people in South America (Triatoma infestans) or Central America ((Rhodnius prolixus) and knowing that black flies (Simulium damnosum) transmit river blindness is only meaningful in Africa. These latter are examples of content that needs to be regionally-focused (and ideally labeled as such) so that it can be easily found and retrieved by local educators or organized for a push into a localized school-server-based repository. I touch on this idea a little bit on the Animal health page when I mention "special localization" issues, but I think it may have a larger scope as an issue (at least in the context of public health messages) and I'd welcome discussion of how best to address this in the content development process (create new categories or other metadata tagging?). Another observation is that although I have noticed that many ideas on the health portions of the wiki fall under the umbrella of public health and a number of the contributors have public health backgrounds, the term "public health" is not explicitly mentioned as an area of focus. Chris Leonard [EMAIL PROTECTED] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Seth Woodworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mar 10, 2008 9:49 AM Subject: Re: [Health] Animals and Health Allow me to reply to this on-list. I think that this is a great idea, and a logical extension to our current projects. I've made it a sub-section under content on the main page. I suggest that you work on putting an overview at [[animal health[[ that is shorter and provides an overview to your sub pages. _______________________________________________ Library mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library
