Phoebe, in my humble opinion, this project is a bit different. I think when we are talking about child development and creating a project for children, there's no room to screw around or create some amateurish product. This is something that, if done wrong, could potentially have a bigger negative impact than if, say, we'd screwed up on Wikinews.
-m. On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 10:11 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 3:37 AM, Milos Rancic <mill...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Yes. We should definitely lay the groundwork well, as Ziko says. But >>> there are good projects underway today and doing this, in spanish, >>> french, and dutch. Some of the organizers of those projects have >>> contributed to the Wikikids proposal on meta. We can start by >>> directing energies there, finding out what Vikidia has learned running >>> projects in French and Spanish, what their standards for >>> project-creation are, and how we can help them. >> >> If we want to go this way, our task will be complex. I don't think >> that we should be afraid of it, but I think that the most of >> participants are underestimating its complexity. >> >> There are a number of important questions to be answered before start >> of such project: >> * Do we have a consistent pedagogical platform for creating such project? >> * How can we be sure that we will have enough relevant pedagogues per >> project? Would we pay them? Or would we create projects with other >> organizations to have them payed? >> * Who will be the main editors of the project? Children of any age? Or >> parents? If parents, I am deeply concerned which social and >> ideological groups we would attract. >> * Is it possible to have such Wikipedia-like project, where >> communities are doing self-regulation? My assumption, based on 6.5 >> years of Wikimedian work, is that it is not possible. (To be more >> precise: Project per se could be successful in gathering editors, but >> it will end as Simple English Wikipedia or as Conservapedia.) >> * Would it be better to find volunteers or hire someone to create a >> project similar to the printed edition of German Wikipedia? First to >> create "illustrated Wikipedia for children", then to create Wikipedias >> for every age of cognitive development. >> * Do we have any clue how crowd sourcing will work with ages between 8 >> and 15? Even though it would be regulated by pedagogues. >> * How group dynamics would look like inside of the project with 8 >> years old and 15 years old? >> * How many pedagogues are able to drive this kind of project? In our >> civilization, pedagogues are product of Industrial Age education and >> they are doing Industrial Age teaching, which is in collision with >> open culture. I think that the right time for relatively open, mass >> collaboration project will be when those born in 1995, generation >> grown up on Wikipedia and open culture, become pedagogues. Around >> 2020. (I am not saying that there are no pedagogues able to do this. >> However, we don't need a couple of pedagogues, we need strong >> pedagogical basis to have possibility to create such kind of project.) >> * etc. >> >> We are all amateurs in cognitive development. My two exams in this >> field makes me an expert on this list. And we don't need just >> professionals, but extraordinary professionals. And those >> professionals have to be introduced well in Wikimedia culture. >> >>> But the teachers there also asked for a simpler-language project in >>> Spanish, and a simple project in English to help students with >>> language learning. >> >> In Serbian we say "you are mixing grandmothers and frogs" :) >> >> I would add one more important implementation of simple-like project: >> Controlled language [1] project. It would allow much easier >> translation between languages. >> >> But, those are three different implementations. We would need >> "Wikimedia for children", "Wikimedia for learning languages" and >> "Wikimedia for machine translation". > > Milos, I think these are all good and valuable questions to ask; any > new project should be put through such rigorous analysis, especially > if it is to succeed. As Birgette says, it's hard to build a wiki and > harder still to build a successful one. > > 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. > > 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. > > -- phoebe > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
