Wikipedia:One Encyclopedia Per Child

Summary

The purpose of this article is to show the character of the best-practice content especially to engage the minds of poor children around the world. The aim of this project is the production of a small corpus in Simple English, the One Encyclopedia Per Child (OEPC), suitable for ultimate downloading to the One Laptop Per Child.

Keywords

OLPC, OEPC, Wikipedia V1.0, Wikipedia_1.0, Wikipedia_on_CD/DVD, K-12, Content Development, Encyclopedia for Children.

Background

Encyclopedias have successfully launched many generations of children as life-long learners. In the early 1900s, privileged children had to try to read their parent's copies of Encyclopædia Britannica to find out about the world. Subsequent generations had their own encyclopedias: Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, Compton’s Encyclopedia, World Book Encyclopedia, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, and now the One Encyclopedia Per Child in Simple English.

Kennedy et al (2006 b-c) have already analysed the possibilities of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) (Wikipedia 2006d) and the side effects, the knock-on effects, the communities, the benefits and changes to the communities, the formation of new communities, the changing teaching patterns and rural life, creative teaching, lifelong learning, ad hoc network traffic and even the implications to higher education. In these works, the authors envisage that fresh HTML, PNG, Audio, MPEG clips and associated driving computer programs will be downloaded daily via wi-fi from the One Laptop Per Teacher (OLPT).

"Wikipedia is an example of a major source of content for the (OLPC) initiative." realizes the Wikipedia founder (Wales 2006). "Jimmy Wales, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, feels that Wikipedia is one of the 'killer apps' for this (OLPC)" (Wikipedia 2006d). However, to fit Wikipedia onto the laptop --maybe 18GB for text only, over 100 GB for graphics too (Wales 2006)-- requires tremendous selection of what is appropriate and wanted by children.

Volunteers for the work are in short supply, so it makes sense to only include that material which children will enjoy or benefit from.

Viewpoint

Today the World Wide Web is a wonderful, huge, but haphazard accumulation of lore mixed with law, with no due regard for verity and verification. It is not a good place for children to begin reading. They need guidance and structure. Children need content that has been carefully collected, collated, catalogued. Material must be attractively formatted, with grammar & spelling fixed, and definitions included. Concepts must be linked to related ideas. Perhaps some essential extract of the Web is the sought-after replacement remedy.

Quotations

"There are two ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal education, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages." (Mandela 1964)

"Children are largely their own teachers, and in a right environment they will teach themselves more than all the schools can teach them." (Mee ca. 1953)

Other approaches

The content of Arthur Mee's The Children's Encyclopedia (1964) is out of date, as is his classification of knowledge. Nevertheless, lasting entries in the indexes can be identified and used to access modern content, and later augmented with new entries relevant to today's children. In the last volumes of The Children's Encyclopedia and The World Book Encyclopedia are indexes to the full sets of encyclopedias. These entries contain the key ideas to encourage young minds.

Wikipedia on CD

Why not a Wikipedia on CD for distribution to all schools? The answer is that the poor still need to purchase a CD-ROM reader. By not using CD-ROM, and using Flash Memory instead it is possible for the encyclopedia to be updated via regular downloads through Internet access at school.

Children's encyclopedia in wiki

It is uncertain how often children's laptops are used with an internet connection. But a wiki is designed not only to impart knowledge but to enable participants to write and built it (in several language) - and has proved its efficiency with Wikipedia. Not only its content (or simple WP's) should be pasted, but also the manner in which it works. Such experiences have been initiated in Dutch (wikikids.nl and Vikidia in French : http://fr.vikidia.org/ and in spanish : http://es.vikidia.org/, and http://fr.wikimini.org. Vikidia in french and Wikikids are quite successful projects with more than 10,000 articles in 2011.

Wikipedia For Schools on USB/DVD

With lesser number of files, more portability and lower size, Kiwix repackaged the SOS Childrens' Villages' Wikipedia For Schools 2008/09. This package can directly auto-run on computers as soon as the DVD or USB is inserted, or can be copied to them and run, is pre-indexed meaning one can search through it as if one is online. On Linux Operating Systems, it can be run using Wine without any issues (so far). The 2.7GB package can be downloaded as a .zip file hosted by Kiwix.org, but is also available split into sections on a mirror website.

Please go to this page that serves as a download and links collection plus collaboration point where people taking charge of spreading this can enlist themselves or their institutions and schools where it has been implemented can be enlisted and tracked:

Wikipedia For Schools Offline Edition on wikia education

Short URL : tinyurl .com / WFSOE ...sans spaces (original URL blocked by spam filter)

Relevance of this approach

The OLPC project seeks to provide a laptop with flash memory for each child, for a relatively low cost. The OLPC has the advantage over CDs that it has the ability to accept updates.

There is a Simple English Wikipedia (2006f). This encyclopedia is intended for use by English “learners” and for teachers in English.

Contributions made

Work has started for the OLPC Project on deciding how to populate the 1 gigabyte of flash and RAM with waves of usable, user-friendly, programs and content (The “Knowledge-Base-of-Material-to-be-Soaked-up” or KBMS). The KBMS must be educationally sound and in the appropriate language.

Three aspects have received consideration by Kennedy (2006d). These are Top level organization, Article titles and Content.

Top level organization

Wikipedia regularly gives prominence to “Featured Articles” (FAs). These are core subject articles which have reached a minimum level of quality (“Featured quality”) for publication. Wikipedia has published a list of these pages (Wikipedia 2006e), which serves as a reminder of the core article subject-areas which must be present in each language in which Wikipedia appears, or else that language's Wikipedia is deficit.

Missing from this “List of Articles”, but present in Mee's Children's Encyclopedia are the vital top level topics “Ourselves”, “Things to do and make”, “Power”, “Wonder questions”, “Ideas”, “Poetry”, “Numbers" (Pre-Algebra Arithmetic), and “How to read”. Further deficits may be found by inspecting other encyclopedias.

Article titles

In the last volumes of Arthur Mee's (ca 1953) Children's Encyclopedia and the World Book Encyclopedia are indexes to the full sets of encyclopedias. These entries contain the key ideas to encourage young minds. The content of Mee's Encyclopedia is very out of date, as is his classification of knowledge. Nevertheless, lasting entries in the indexes can be identified and used to access modern content, and later augmented with new entries of relevancy to today's children.

Content

Content can be retrieved from the Wikipedia in Simple English. Wikipedia has published a list of articles that all language editions should have, which forms a useful core of topics. It was found by Kennedy (2006d) that some of the core topic words (e.g., “Agriculture”) are not known to the target population, and it is necessary to give an explanation (“Farming”).

Kennedy (2006d) has prioritised these core topics by means of the simple expedient of inquiring from a child what his interests are. On the average, most topics tend to be rated as being very interesting. Only 5 of the 163 core topics were rated as being not interesting (Algebra, Philosophy, Publication, Sex, and Society). Work on these 5 core topics can be given the lowest priority.

Vocabulary, Language, Fonts, etc

Kennedy (2006d) also gives hints on keeping the English simple, the vocabulary basic, and the fonts big. He finishes by including ideas about complementary content and a search engine. The prototype

To test the advocated approach to constructing the OEPC in Simple English, a combined list was culled and collated by Kennedy (2006d) from the first column of entries in The Children's Encyclopedia and the corresponding three and a third columns of entries in The World Book Encyclopedia. His results follow below and these can be linked into the Simple English Wikipedia.

A-bomb
A-frame
A-line style
A
A capella
Aachen
Aalborg
Aardvark
Aardwolf
Aarhus
Aaron
Abacus
Abalone
Abbreviations
Abdication
Abdomen
Abednego
Abel
Aberdeen
Aberdeen-Angus
Aberdeen University
Aberration
Abide With Me
Abidjan
Ablation
Aborigines

Frame 1: Selected initial entries from Children’s Encyclopedia and World Book Encyclopedia

Frame 1 gives a combined list culled and collated from the first column of entries in The Children’s Encyclopedia and the corresponding three and a third columns of entries in The World Book Encyclopedia. Corresponding entries were sought in the Simple English Wikipedia, and failing that in the English Wikipedia (shown in bold) and linked. These bold articles are suitable for the older child. Only one desired entry could not be found in these two encyclopedias ("A-line style").

Contributions required

In the last volumes of Arthur Mee's (ca 1953) Children's Encyclopedia and the World Book Encyclopedia are indexes to the full sets of encyclopedias. These entries contain the key ideas to encourage young minds. The content of Mee's Encyclopedia is very out of date, as is his classification of knowledge. Nevertheless, lasting entries in the indexes can be identified and used to access modern content, and later augmented with new entries of relevancy to today's children.

Outstanding problems

Wikipedias, including the Simple English Encyclopedia are highly linked internally. This is fine if the child has continuous access to the World Wide Web, but this cannot be assumed in the poor communities being targeted by the OEPC. Volunteers are needed to de-link those links to other articles that do not appear in the condensed corpus. The articles may be deliberately missing because they are not deemed to be of interest to the target population, or be omitted for reasons of compression. Such work is facilitated by tools such as AOLPress which allows searches for missing links.

Links

References

Kennedy I. G. (2006b) Using revolution, evolution, randomness and dead-ends in Educational Design. ITHET 2006

Kennedy I. G. & Rex van Olst. (2006c) How can education through One Laptop Per Child empower scholars, siblings, parents and teachers? IADIS 2006

Kennedy I. G., (2006d) One Encyclopedia Per Child. (How can children learn about the world, and how can they be encouraged to use their imagination through the $100 laptop?) ELEARN 2006

Mandela, N., (1964) Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial. [1]

Mee, Arthur. Ed. (ca 1953) The Children's Encyclopedia. London: The Educational Book Company p. 2.

Wales, J., 2006 [2]

The World Book Encyclopedia (1980) World book - Childcraft International. Chicago

Wikipedia 2006d Wikipedia: $100_laptop

Wikipedia 2006e Wikipedia: List of articles all languages should have

Wikipedia 2006f Wikipedia: Simple English Wikipedia [3]