Projects: Wikipedia for Schools - Indian version



The SOS Children's Village Project, an NGO from Great Britain, and the  Wikimedia Foundation have  put together an offline Wikipedia referred to as "Wikipedia for  Schools".

See the online version here.

However that edition consists of articles selected for the Western cultural  context. It needs tweaking to be relevant to our environment. Plus, we will need to collect equivalent sets for each Indian Language. Probably, some wikipedias may not have equivalent inter-wikis and will need fresh  articles written for them.

Project Aim
This project aims to compile a fresh selection of articles for an offline  Wikipedia in the Indian context.

User:AshLin says: The aim is to compile a set of articles suitable for the Indian school  system. The basis for this is the SOS Children's Villages collection which forms the first offline wikipedia compilation for schools  (henceforth called the SOS compilation). Since the compilation is designed for the British school syllabus, there is a need to make the  choice of articles suitable for India.

I think that this is an important activity that needs to be done on larger scales. I have a vision of how we can modularise all this.
 * First of all, we need a thinned down version with all British-specific extra articles  removed. This needs to be vetted so that the collection is  representative of international community. As of now, the SOS  compilation looks quite suitable but we need to vet it to ensure that it  is so. This is the base International module.
 * To make a country-specific module, we add a country-specific addon module to the base international module.
 * Therefore, we identify additional articles for each country's compilation. The British articles that we do away from the SOS compilation can form the basis of the British addon module.
 * In addition, to all this, vetting would need to be done to remove material  inappropriate for schoolchildren. Material contrary to the laws of the  country would need to be removed. There may be additional activities to  be done.
 * Once all this is done, the additional work of removing template tags etc is done.
 * A kiwix compilation is made after all cleanup work is done.

Full fledged edition

 * 1) Prepare list of topics of the latest version of Wikipedia for Schools (SOS Children's Village Project version - html download). (Done)
 * 2) Count them. (Done).
 * 3) Check each section's topics for relevance and :
 * Delete articles pertaining to British/North American cultural contexts irrelevant to the Indian context.
 * Add articles relevant to the Indian context.


 * 1) Prepare list of desired topics from a set of textbooks in CBSE and countercheck availability on Wikipedia for Schools - Indian version.
 * 2) Get list counter-checked with the Learning Lab's semantic and phyllogenic web (proposed).
 * 3) During the process (steps 3 to 6) get peer review.
 * 4) Get domain experts in each field to cross-check if any important topics left out.
 * 5) Censorship (as required).
 * 6) Article improvement - no tags please.
 * 7) If Wikipedia for Schools occupies less space, add articles. If Wikipedia for Schools exceeds size of DVD then trim number of articles.
 * 8) Compile the offline version - humungous task.
 * 9) Trial deployment.
 * 10) Usability testing.
 * 11) Release version 0.1.

India 500
under construction

Geography package
under construction

Participants

 * AshLin
 * Tinucherian
 * Amolkumar
 * naveenpf

Compilation 2008/09 - Main Subject Heads
These are the present 16 subject heads comprising a total of 6118 articles in the SOS compilation of 2008/2009:
 * Art - Offline version - 86 articles.
 * Business Studies -Offline version -141 articles.
 * Citizenship - Offline version - 308 articles.
 * Countries - Offline version - 226 articles.
 * Design and Technology - Offline version - 264 articles.
 * Everyday Life - Offline version - 430 articles.
 * Geography - Offline version (1162 articles) - Indian version ( 1491 articles).
 * History - Offline version - 849 articles
 * IT - Offline version - 86 articles
 * Language and literature - Offline version - 216 articles
 * Mathematics - Offline version - 283 articles
 * Music - Offline version - 168 articles
 * People - Offline version - 751 articles
 * Portals - Offline version - 36 articles
 * Religion - Offline version - 158 articles
 * Science - Offline version - 1310 articles

Another view of this given with sections/subsections listed here

Other related ventures

 * The One Laptop Per Child project OLPC has Wikislices for its XO tablet PC.
 * User:Nikhilsheth has ported the SOS Children's Village English Wikipedia for Schools to the portable ZIM file format for distribution. You can read more about his project here.


 * Creating the Malayalam Wikipedia CD (Shiju Alex) - Malayalam CD - English equivalents of articles - Raw list