Submissions/Children can have their own Wikipedia, the Vikidia experience
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After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August. |
- Submission no. 3005
- Title of the submission
Children can have their own Wikipedia, the Vikidia experience
- Type of submission
presentation
- Author of the submission
Astirmays, Mathias Damour, 20:55, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
- E-mail address
- Username
- Country of origin
France
- Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Vikidia association, Wikimedia France
- Personal homepage or blog
http://vikidia.org , http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Astirmays
- Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
Vikidia is the equivalent of Wikipedia for children: 8 to 13-year-old readers, open to contributors of any age. It was launched in November 2006 in French, then in Spanish, Italian, Russian and recently in English. It aims both at offering a suitable corpus of knowledge for children and letting some of them, as well as teenagers, be involved in building it. Yet everybody is invited to edit Vikidia without age restrictions. It is very closed to Wikipedia in its aim and functioning, except the readers age range.
Many children already use Wikipedia daily, for the substantial content and the well known convenient way it is to find material on any subject. However, the level of Wikipedia articles makes them hardly accessible for children — and even other people on some subjects. Children really need and appreciate it when a more readable content is available to them.
15 years before the Wikimedia Foundation's vision, mission and values were stated as to empower and engage people around the world to freely share knowledge, did the Convention on the Rights of the Child stated barely the same, yet especially for children :
- The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.
and
- States Parties recognize the important function performed by the mass media and shall ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health. ([1])
Beside the "knowledge resource" benefit of such a project, there is also some specials benefits involving children and teenagers in building the content. It can also expand the opportunities for the wiki education programs by making possible to reach younger pupils.
Such wikis have proven their sustainability, relevance and success, the two biggest ones following this model being Vikidia in French and WikiKids.nl in Dutch, with respectively 16000 and 14000 articles and hundreds of thousands readers every month. Yet they have not been opened or have not thrived in some major languages. I will especially share my experience in opening and caring of the 7 years old http://fr.vikidia.org , how children and teenagers get involved through the years, how it welcomes and deals with schools projects.
- Track
- Education Outreach
- Length of session
- 30 minutes
- Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
- Slides or further information (optional)
http://blog.wikimedia.fr/vikidia-in-english-opens-today-lets-build-a-children-wiki-encyclopedia-6400
- Special requests
Could profitably be merged with Submissions/WikiKids, the children's wikipedia in the Netherlands, to make a joint presentation - discussion (30 minutes presentation and 30 minutes discussion) about theses homologous projects, since we agree to do that (see talk) Astirmays (talk) 21:20, 2 April 2014 (UTC).
Interested attendees
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