As a public school teacher I have had a bumpy relationship with wikimedia. Personally, I love the concept, and the goal to develop and maintain open content, and to provide full contents of wiki based projects to the public free of charge. Hand in glove with public education, right? Well, it seems some in the educational world disagree, and wikipedia did suffer some credibility damage over the years, while others argue that new editing techniques using peer review insure non biased and accurate entries. I know I love to use it as a starting point for student research, a jumping off point of sorts.
My most important interaction with wikimedia came in early 2008 when my family participated in the OLPC give one get one program. OLPC is a non-profit organization set up to create an affordable educational computing device for use in the developing world. Its mission is "to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."
The OLPC project was completely supported by the wikimedia foundation. In August of 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops. Jimmy Wales, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection." So, when we got our little green xo-1 almost every help function, software download, upgrade, application background, etc. was to be found on a wiki page of some sort. The static wikipedia files were on the machine and super cool for the kids, easy and thorough. The access to community forums, software debugs, and upgrades was easy to follow in the wiki format.
As we used the xo-1 (mainly my the 6 year old daughter) we used one important wikimedia portal, wikibooks, specifically wikijunior. The xo-1 has been criticized on many levels, but it is a good e-book reader, and the use of ebooks and wikipedia articles was a boon for my daughter. Much like the OLPC, the wikijunior site is somewhat incomplete, but does have some great resources. Admittedly, the format was and is challenging for my daughter, but overall it has been a useful site.
Another wikimedia portal that is intriguing is wikisource. Wikisource has over 140,000 texts, an open free content library for the world. It has many nice older documents from prior to 1923, now copyright free, and a wide variety of more contemporary materials.
I think the wikipedia article about wikimedia is thorough and honest. It gives a nice overview of the structure, the history, and goals of the wikimedia foundation. In addition, it outlines some of the problems and pitfalls of the endeavor. I for one hope the wikimedia foundation prospers in to the future.
Much as Jimmy Wales might wish or imagine that he is the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, that notorious distinction belongs (currently) to Michael Snow. With the Foundation spending only about 32 cents of every revenue dollar on actual program services, though, I'm not sure how much longer even Snow can last in that position before being ousted by either the crowd or the Internal Revenue Service.
ReplyDeleteNice rundown Thomas. What did you think of the OLPC machine? I am undecided on how useful it really is for the target market.
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