Kennisnet

Kennisnet is the Dutch organisation that makes one portal of all kinds of information on the internet that is useful to children who speak Dutch (Nederlands) in education. Currently (2005) Kennisnet has an audience of 2.500.000 students. Kennis is the Dutch word for knowledge.

Initiative

On the initiative of some Dutch Wikimedians, we have contacted Kennisnet to see how Wikimedia can partner with Kennisnet to make the most of our shared audience. There were two main topics on the outset:

• Wikijunior
• Vandalism from behind proxies that are schools. A lot of vandalism on NL Wikipedia seems to occur from schools. In the past, 10 proxies have been blocked permanently.

Some misunderstandings about Kennisnet

1. they are NOT an ISP, they were a mediatory between a project also called Kennisnet that gave schools access to the internet. From 2004 onwards these contracts do not exist anymore. So now the idea is not only wrong but also outdated.
2. they are NOT a content provider, they are a portal, but they do build services on top of that portal. So their primary function is delivering content from all relevant parties to the Dutch educational system.

Now practically

1. In principle Kennisnet can use our projects. However, they will also be part of our community. It is therefore important that the existing wikimedians who are also Kennisnet identify themselves as such. This will give Kennisnet street-cred.
2. Many of the Kennisnet editors will become more involved with our projects. We have indicated that we are happy to give a presentation/workshop to these people (over 100 active editors).
3. We may write on a regular basis to the schools/teachers/ict-coordinators. So we need to write our first piece.
4. There is an urgent need for Wikimedia Nederland as a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. It means that we will need to talk about this and make our ideas clear about this subject.
5. We need to continue making the board and the Dutch people aware of what is going on and what the stichting (Dutch word meaning 'foundation') will be for.

Ongoing cooperations

Hosting

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On Monday 23 may 2005, the servers that will host Wikimedia content were installed in Amsterdam. They are SUN V20z and a V40z equiped with AMD Opteron dual processor. They are connected using gigabit ethernet to a CISCO 3560 switch. They are connected to the 1Gbps (Surfnet) Internet connection of Kennisnet.

The equipment was architected in cooperation of mark- and Kate and Kennisnet. One of the aspects that was important was a high mean time before failure (MTBF) and a small footprint. The hardware can be found in its own rack and as you can see in the picture there is some room to grow.

The servers do not have a name but, we hope that Dutch encyclopedists or lexicologists will be honoured by naming the servers after them. The idea of honouring Mr Johan Hendrik van Dale (after whom the dictionary that is the de facto standard for the dutch language was named), would be particularly nice.

The Queen Beatrix jubilee project

The Dutch wikipedia, wikinews and wiktionary project cooperate with Kennisnet in a project to have the Dutch schools cooperate on the Dutch wiki projects. For this purpose, they have information about the jubilee from the project's life on their site.

It is an exciting experiment where we will learn a lot about how we can deal with a big influx of schoolkids. How much vandalism will it generate ? How will we be able to cooperate with schools ? This long running project went live on 25th of April 2005.

More information

We have some more information in Dutch and/or English

Kennisnet/nl and Kennisnet/en more introductory information

Kennisnet/en/Kennisnet and Wikipedia a brainstorm session about how to use Wiki technology and content.

External links

• About the Kennisnet Foundation