Hadn’t come across this before, but the children’s charity SOS Children’s Villages UK has produced a downloadable .zip of Wikipedia entries they think would be useful to children in terms of subject and quality, that people can distribute via CD.
SOS Children have released a free encyclopaedia (with 8000 images and 4000 pages worth of text) made up of articles cleaned up and selected from Wikipedia, and aimed at improving awareness of the world around us amongst 8-15 year olds. They include articles of particular interest to children (dinosaurs, space travel, the Solar System, plants and animals) and a wide variety of other scientific and geographical topics. The 2006 articles have been hand-picked from Wikipedia, tidied up (by deletion only, not alteration), checked for plausibility and suitability (by volunteers, whom we gratefully acknowledge) and put together in a form suitable for publication on a CD. We judge the content to be child friendly and allows a “surfing” experience with many cross-linked articles within a safe offline environment. The encyclopaedia can be downloaded as a zip file together with a copy of the SOS Children UK website with some details of our work in 125 countries.
What a brilliant idea.
