SOS Children releases 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection
06/04/2006
Note: this has been superseded by the 2007 schools wikipedia selection.
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.
We believe the overall quality of the articles we have selected is very good. We have left some minor typos and other possible minor errors where on balance the content was worthy of inclusion nonetheless. The articles have been chosen (out of around 800,000 on the www.wikipedia.org website) for quality, suitability and interest to children between the ages of about 8-15, and are intended to help children become more aware of the world around them.
The ZIP file is no longer available for download because it has been superseded by the 2007 schools wikipedia selection.
The 2006 content can be viewed at Fixed Reference.