2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools online
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- There’s many a home in the US and Europe with a huge set of encyclopaedias costing an arm and a leg, which no one ever consults, which occupy huge amount shelf space and which, by virtue of the fact they’re print books, must always be two or three years out of date, at best.
But here’s a set with a diffence. And it doesn’t take up any space at all.
Working with the Wikimedia Foundation, the SOS Children UK orphan charity has just launched the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools.
Previous revisions have been distributed off-line by the Shuttleworth Foundation to South Africa Schools, by the Hole in the Wall project to rural Indian children, and through SOS offices worldwide.
This updated “checked content” selection holds the same amount of data as a 20 volume encyclopaedia with 34,500 pictures, 20 million words and articles on more than 5,500 topics.
And it’s a downloadable, or collected free from SOS Children!
Aimed at 8-17 year olds who broadly follow the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere, it was originally designed for remote developing world schools without Net access, but is now featured widely on first world school intranets and websites.
There is, of course, a browsable version which, says the foundation, pulls in an average of well over ten thousand human surfers a day.
“Around 15% of last year’s article selection has been removed as no longer meeting rising relevancy standards and more than fifteen hundred more relevant topics have been added, as now of high quality,” says the Wikipedia.
SOS Children’s Villages is best known as the world’s largest orphan charity (UK Charity No. 1069204), but it’s also a very large educational concern running 192 schools with 91,000 pupils in the developing world.
It’d also be a great resource for parents who, like us, homeschooling children.
The full Wikipedia for Schools selection is available via BitTorrent.
If you don’t already have a BitTorrent download application, enter ‘BitTorrent client‘ in your favourite search engine, or check the Slyck list of clients.
And when you’ve finished your download, it helps the charity if you keep the client running.
“This is so that you can participate in the peer to peer bittorrent cloud for our schools wikipedia distribution,” and help keep bandwidth costs down, explains the organisation.
And it’s fast. Our version is currently coming down at 338 k/Bs. 
JN
News 1130 – , October , 2008
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