Wikijunior/Question on the website

I guess I need to note that I was the one who originally raised these questions at the Wikibooks Staff Lounge User:Zanimum has done the replies. --Roberth 03:17, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

How does content get "flagged" to be "moved" over to the read-only site? Votes on content? Admin discression? An "editorial board" that can move this content over? What about "updates" to the content and when does that get moved over?

Unanswered, I'll try to gety to it Monday.

Is the new website going to be pure HTML, or a read-only Wiki? (both have merits with advantages/disadvantages)

If we design it well enough in wiki formatting, it would be great to have it that way. It all depends on the designs that people come up with for the site. See below for more.

Are we going to include the Wikijunior books in a format other than HTML? We already have PDF and Audio book formats for some content right now. What about other formats including printed versions?

Yes, the original intent of this project, and the only reason it was launched, was printed editions. That's what the Beck Foundation offered us a grant for in the first place. If we do decide to print the Solar System first, we have to convince the Beck Foundation that this change to our grant proposal is worth it; the original proposal was for an animal-themed book.

The Point I was trying to make here is that the "Big Cats" book doesn't seem to be progressing as quickly as the Solar System book. This is mainly an issue of interest and available content regarding the subject matter. Certainly if we had to publish the "Big Cats" Wikijunior book, I suppose it could be done.

Are we going to offer the content up for sale with an on-line bookstore to purchase a printed/bound copy of some of the content? Are we going to allow educational institutions and organizations the chance to obtain for free copies provided through the Beck Foundation grant?

The content is available under a free license, so if anyone sells it, it might as well be us. Considering how easy it is to sell on Lulu or Cafepress, why not? We might want to charge a very nominal fee, plus postage, for institutions and organizations. I'd imagine if anything was entire for free, they'd have a certain skepticism. Plus, charging for postage lowers costs, which means we can print more copies of the books.

Why a nominal fee? I've looked at both Lulu and Cafepress and neither is very attractive for a number of reasons, but I suppose that we could do either one. Cafepress is a good example of some people making some money off of free projects. It is a neat idea, and certainly some money ends up going to the project run through Cafepress, but at the same time it a pure for-profit venture. I'll go over the fine points of the cost breakdown if you wish, but sticking to one set of printing companies may or may not be the best approach. This may be a whole seperate idea to fight with and should be reserved for another discussion.

Why is information about the Beck Foundation kept so secretive? All of the links on Meta point to some concrete manufacturer that has nothing to do with this grant or project, and all attempts to get the correct information seem to fall on deaf ears. (That website is litterally a foundation construction company that offers jobs in the construction industry... not book publishing or educational activities of any sort.) Is this grant from the Beck Foundation for real or is it a farce? Where is the paperwork for the grant and who has the "signatures" and other contact information for the grant?

Danny is the Grants head, and he is the one who successfully applied for the grant, so he is the only one with any such records. I don't believe there's even much discussion of Beck on the grants.wikimedia.org website. However, we did recently add links to two actual Beck Foundations, on the main Meta page for Wikijunior.

And this just muddled the question further as now there are two similar foundations that seem to be the Beck Foundation. There has been some further clarification on the issue, but in this case people are committing time and resources to accomplishing a goal for a grant that nobody seems to know anything about. Certainly the information about the grant is far from transparent, particularly with regards to what the Wikimedia Foundation is going to get from it. I am in effect advocating that we ignore the Beck Foundation Grant entirely at the moment, as the people who were involved with trying to obtain the money are not participating with the Wikijunior community, and certainly information about the grant is not forthcoming on the particular details involved. Critical information such as the exact language of the grant, who the contacts are for the grant, and what the deadlines involved are not available, and information on Meta is very sketchy at best. This is not a way to run something in a Wikimedia project, much less any not-for-profit public community group. Supposedly this is for a grant that has already been "approved", not for something that is "in the works", or is it?

Is this going to keep the Wikibook format of seperate "projects" or is it going to be a "Wikipedia-Junior" collection of articles in an overall encyclopedic format? I prefer the current book format, but zanimum seems to prefer the encyclopedic format, from what I've seen so far.

I can't see any reason we can't have a hybrid. Just as Wikipedia's articles are all seperate, but there are article series templates to help people navigate through similar topics, we can do that with each book. For years, the only call for kids content on Meta has been for kids encyclopedias, my positioning on this matter is based on previous demand. Having an encyclopedia format also would let us create articles on whatever, and string them together as books when we feel like it. ******* Your creation of the gigantic Ancient Civilizations book (we could have three books just on Egypt, and not run out of material) suggests you'd like people to have the freedom to create at their own will, encyclopedia allow that.

That is your opinion on the subject, and I think this is something that can't be simply declared by one single benevolant dictator. This is a community issue and a decision that will have to be made through concensus of some sort. I'm not saying that we may get to following your suggestion here, but let's see what other major contributors to Wikijunior think about the idea.

Who is going to maintain the content on the new site? While Stewards and Wikibooks admins might be a good start, I think it should be more with the very active participants of the Wikijunior books themselves as a seperate community. How are they going to be selected and are they going to be given sysop privileges on the new site? That would mean more like developer privileges if it is going to be a more pure HTML website.

We could have our version of admins, perhaps "sub-admins" since they don't have full admin power on any top-level Wikimedia project, as we're still part of Wikibooks. Frankly, I wouldn't mind allowing anyone who's demonstrated good intent on Wikibooks or Meta Wikipedia to

There are no "sub-admins" currently with the MediaWiki software, so we are talking about creating a whole new category and some major developer resources here to come up with the new way to deal with the issue. That certainly some new users can be granted "admin" status on the new portal may be true, but the whole issue about how this is going to be set up in the first place needs to be dealt with. So far, you seem to be proposing a whole new project, not just a new domain name right now. The way you've gone about trying to do this seems inappropriate and going through the wrong channels, which is what I've been saying for some time now.

What is the "front page" format going to look like? Right now Wikijunior is very functional and designed more for editing rather than something kids would be interested in. Are we going to make it more "kid-friendly" like a video-game console? A very different kind of "skin" for this project as well for the default? Who is going to come up with this new format for the front page and subsequent navigation?

We can put the design challenge up to the community in a few weeks time, provided we get a domain. It definetly should be graphically engaging, but at its base easily editable, so new pages can be made in a snap by people with only minimal HTML skills.

This "design community" is non-existant at the moment. Certainly there may be some people who want to dabble with this issue, but I don't want to trivialize this either. The success or failure of this website is going to be how "kid-friendly" it will be percieved by our target audience. Unfortunately, we are competing with some other kid-related websites and perhaps we should take some pointers from those sites to see how we can make this comparable in nature.

How are links from this new site going to link back to Wikibooks and the editable content? Should it even link back except as a non-hyperlink reference? How are we going to keep this "kid-friendly"?

The "Parents" page and "Educators" page will have information on how the content is developed, and thus a link to Wikibooks. We'll obviously have the standard Wikimedia links on every page, and we could easily add a "This is a project run by Wikibooks" next to it.

The reason I raise this question is because we don't want to have a kid looking at a goatse.cx image as the first thing they look at... even if done by a random link from something on this Wikijunior website. By advertising this as something for kids, we are raising the bar much higher than something typically found with a normal Wikimedia website. External links are going to be a real problem and can potentially put all of use, particularly those who want to be admins, directly into a legal challenge if some of that unsavory content shows up... even for just a couple of minutes.

Should this link to anywhere external to the site except maybe the Wikimedia Foundation main page and perhaps gnu.org for GFDL information? What about cross-references and footnoted bibliographies and how should we deal with that? If this has full cross-references hyperlinked, why make a seperate site altogether anyway? Why not simply have a redirect with wikijunior.org go straight to Wikibooks instead?

Whenever someone clicks on a link on the site, they arrive at a disclaimer page, they click a link on that page to go to the external reference, or return to the article they were in. That's what organizations like PBS and Nickeldeon do, so I can't see it not working for us. We might even have a "Where we got the information" link on each page, as most kids that age don't concern themselves with sources. I'd love for Wikijunior.org to just redirect to Wikibooks, but then there's no protection against vandalism. We just can't deal with that.

This goes more into the point I was trying to deal with before. Organizations like PBS and Nickelodeon generally don't have external links, particularly on their children's sections. Look carefully at them to be sure. Those sites generally tend to link to other pages within the site in part because of the legal issues involved, and if there are external links, they are strongly vetted to make sure the content is not something you want a 12 year old to come across by mistake (like some child pornographer trying to offer them a free X-Box if they send in a photo of themselves). As a wiki, this can and unfortunately does happen (well, maybe not to that degree, but sometimes close). Links to protected pages are a little better, but in this case all of the content on the site is going to be "protected". BTW, I hate those "warning" pages where you try to click on an external web reference and you go to a "warning" page instead that forces you to read a disclaimer first. That was something dreamt up by a lawyer who totally didn't understand web technology and was hyper paranoid anway.

What about international language versions of this project? Who is going to maintain those and will it be all part of the same site? Is there any content translated or worked on in other languages that would be worth including? Surprisingly, I think Chinese may be the furthest along than any other language besides English for Wikijunior, but as I don't speak Chinese this is something I havn't been able to verify or confirm other than a bunch of words written in that language. That does make the Chinsese P.R.C. government censors something to worry about as well and forces that issue much sooner than even what Wikinews and Wikipedia have had to face so far. Generally I don't think Wikijunior is going to be much of an issue in that regard, but something to worry about perhaps in the future.

We have trusted Chinese users (who they are I don't know, as I've never dealt with matters on zh) and we can just ask them to join in, essentially as approvers. I'm sure for each language, there'd be at least one person kind enough to approve or deny any of the week's previous changes to the Wikibooks version. Let's just ignore the PRC for now. Until we have what their censors might consider controversial content, there's no need to be wary. If anything, I think they'd like us. The country is really stepping up to the plate, becoming a modern consumerist society, for better or for worse. I wouldn't doubt we could even get funds from their education ministry, seeing how we can provide high quality goods for an at-cost price.

As this page doesn't seem to be much beyond you and my arguing in private, I guess it really doesn't matter what goes on here. The #1 point I'm making is that you (User:Zanimum) seem to be making decisions unilaterally and I'm suggesting that there are many issues that need to be addressed among the community of users that are activly participating right now. The questions I raised above were to show a start of the fact there is more than one way to accomplish the general goal you are proposing, and that this is something of a community decision that needs to be made. That community decision has not been made, and I don't think you need to present yourself as anything other than one person who has a strong opinion on the topic at hand. Certainly don't speak for the Wikijunior community as a whole, as you really don't have any formal position within that community. Not that I do either, but I am not claiming to represent anybody but myself and suggesting that there is more than one opinion about how to proceed. --Roberth 03:17, 8 October 2005 (UTC)