We have now a Klexikon page on Meta Wiki which collects information in English. Many people at Wikimania had questions about this ‘Wikipedia for children’, and some even want to start one in their own language.
Next week starts Wikimania, the annual main conference on Wikipedia, in Ciudad de Mexico. I have the privilege to represent Wikimedia Nederland again. This time, my focus will be on education and the question how does a wiki work – what can we improve in Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Movement.
The Wikimedia Movement has seen quite some friction on last year’s Wikimania, in London. On the one hand, the movement does well, with a uberpopular website and lots of donations. On the other, the number of contributors to Wikipedia is still declining, in spite of all efforts. Also the number of readers is not a fixed given or only growing.
My presentation this year will be about the Klexikon and more generally about wiki encyclopedias for children. We are talking quite different concepts, but I will try to find out how people can cooperate and make the participants curious about our new wiki. Good luck that today the English version of our final report for WMDE got ready!
Follow me on the Facebook channel of Wikimedia Nederland or on Twitter (@UserVanTwit).
The Klexikon is progressing: in July, it saw its 750th article. Given that each and every one of them consists of several paragraphs and meets our general requirements, that is quite an achievement. Many printed children encyclopedias have only some hundred or maybe 1000 or 1500 articles.
Temporarily, the readership did not grow much. We saw that most readers the Klexikon has on school days, and much less in the weekend. Also, the recent very sunny days seem to make playing outdoors more attractive than browsing the Internet. That’s great! So it is surprising that this Monday the wiki attracted more readers again.
(Picture: With Michael Schulte at the university of Dortmund, June 2015 (second from the right: Michael Beißwenger). We had a Klexikon presentation and workshop to find out how to cooperate in future.)
Frühjahr im Dorumer Moor (Spring at the Dorum Bog), by Herbert Rohde CC-BY-SA 3.0.
An unpleasant finding: It seems that a winning picture of Wiki Loves Earth was manipulated in a inappropriate way. A Wikipedia user noticed some unusual elements of the picture winning 5th rank.
At the talk page of the ‘Kurier’ of German Wikipedia, user:Sitacuisses presented his thoughts on a picture called ‘Frühjahr im Dorumer Moor’. A nice landscape photo, but with geese flying suspiciously low over the bog. Two storks sit in the bog looking overly perfect. The sun is shining bright, but does not have to do much with the shadows of the trees.
These elements were likely photoshopped into the frame, although the terms of participation prohibit strong photo editing.
The problem of such a photo competition is that we want a lot of (new) people to come to a Wikimedia wiki (Wikimedia Commons) and contribute in their way. All pictures are contest contributions and have to be examined by the jury. A lot of work, and obviously sometimes a frame slips through that shouldn’t have.
The users of German Wikipedia discuss now what the consequences might be, also for the WLE competition of next year.
Our project Klexikon, the wiki encyclopedia for children has now more than 350 articles. This is not much, but the growth is sustainable and the articles are real articles worth reading (even if they are not always long).
The project ‘A report on a free encyclopedia for children’ is approaching its end. Wikimedia Deutschland asked us to write such a report, based also on our experiences with the actual wiki. It should appear at the end of March or a little later. Nevertheless, the Klexikon wiki will go on.
Recently I have again looked at a greater number of wikis other than Wikipedia. It struck me that one peticular question is often difficult to answer: what did the makers expect?
Obviously, the founders or owners of a wiki have not always clear goals. They sure have a ‘project scope’ that defines what content is desired and who is the target group. But I rarely see objectives, or often the objectives are hardly clearer than the general scope.
Or I see objectives in the form of ‘milestones’, with regard to some statistical marks. You want your wiki to have 1000 articles? Why? And what articles are we talking about? Quality articles that make your readers happy, or ‘articles’ of any kind, with the minimal definition ‘article = page in the article name space’?
An old joke says:
A politician talks about the goal he can already see at the horizon. Someone looks up the word in the dictionary: Horizon. An imaginary line. When you try to approach it, it will move away from you with the same speed.
If you constantly expand your scope, your goal will be like a horizon. Possibly, a wiki can make its contributors and readers much more happy with a limited scope and with realistic goals.
Since January 6th, 2015, the Klexikon has more than 100 articles. This is a nice start for a children’s encyclopedia that exists only for one month. Also, the articles are really nice, due to a peticular article creation process.
On Wikipedia, if a new article is created, what follows? If it is a decent article, you will possibly receive no or little response. As someone said: ‘Be happy, if at least nobody complains.’ Or, more likely if you are a newcomer: your article will be deleted immediately, or nominated for deletion, or anyway you will meet a lot of negative feedback.
The Klexikon is different. Articles, from a given expandable list, are first created as drafts in a draft name space. It is public, but not immediately a part of the encyclopedia. People can work on it collaboratively, it may take a day, a couple of days or a week. Taking away tempo out of the process means taking away a lot of stress.
If three collaborators find the draft okay, it can be moved to the article name space. This is a positive experience for the creator, right at the start of the article’s existence. Also, the creator has a motive to deliver a good draft and improve it, because he/she wishes it to become an article.
The result is that our more than 100 articles are looking good and meet a basic standard. Klexikon articles should be easy to understand and suitable for children.
If you are impressed or totally unimpressed, or would like to join, please contact us via kontakt@klexikon.de
In Summer 2014 started a project for a new wiki, supported by Wikimedia Deutschland: Klexikon, the Free Encyclopedia for Children. Since December 1st, we are creating articles.
After the journalist Michael Schulte proposed the wiki, and received funding, I became engaged with the project as a wiki consultant. The host for our wiki is ‘ZUM’, a German association of teachers who use wikis and open educational resources in their lessons.
The name “Klexikon” comes from the German words “Kinder” (children) and “Lexikon”, a common German expression for an encyclopedia. “Klex-” has also a funny pun because of the German word “Klecks”, a blot or splodge.
In general, the Klexikon is supposed to become a kind of Wikipedia:
It is based on the concept of Free Knowledge.
It’s a wiki, an instrument for collaboratively creating user-generated content.
It’s an encyclopedia, meaning a structured collection of a certain text sort.
Not (just) imitating Wikipedia
But there are also some important differences to Wikipedia. First of all, it is directed to children to the age of ca. six to twelve years. Writing for children means to make it absolutely comprehensible for this section of the population. A child-oriented writing has also to pay attention to the ‘Lebenswelt’, to the world in which children live. We cannot ignore all the negative things on our planet, but they should be presented in a way really suitable for children.
In some aspects, we want to have the Klexikon very different from Wikipedia – not necessarily because Wikipedia is something bad. But there is simply no need to imitate all of the Wikipedia content and structure. Articles about all members of the German parliament, all subway stations in Vienna or the entire flora and fauna of Switzerland: we have that already in Wikipedia. We also don’t try to recreate the whole Wikipedia category system in the Klexikon. Possibly, in future, Wikidata will help us with certain connections between pages and content.
What about existing childrens’ wikis?
It’s time for a Free Childrens’ Encyclopedia. Help us to explore the world.
There are a number of wikis, outside the Wikimedia movement, that are occupied with a similar challenge. Many of them are ‘instructional wikis’, their primary goal is to teach something: pupils learn how to use a wiki, how to write a text, how to edit the texts of others. This is an important goal by itself. But it is not a suitable way to create quality content. After the class has used the wiki for some days or weeks, the young participants usually are not interested in improving the articles anymore.
Other wikis are content wikis indeed, they seriously work to create an encyclopedia for children. When we browse the articles of these wikis, we see a lot of extremely short articles. Many articles are hardly easier to understand than a usual Wikipedia article.
At the Klexikon, we are afraid that poor quality can make a bad impression on readers. They might not give us a second chance. A Klexikon article does not have to be perfect – but it shouldn’t be ‘unready’. It must be recognisable as a ‘real’ article. Therefore, we start articles in a name space called ‘Entwurf’ (draft). This takes speed from the article creating process and provides a space where you can make errors. When three collaborators deem a draft to be good enough, it is transferred to the article name space. Of course, the article can still be worked on later.
Also, those other wikis usually imitate Wikipedia in many ways. They are hardly easier to edit than Wikipedia, because they use more or less the same complicated wiki code. In the Klexikon, we allow only very few basic wiki code in the source code of the texts. This reduces the amount of what new collaborators have to learn.
Who is allowed to participate?
One of the first charts to explain how the Klexikon works.
Another challenge of Wikipedia and many other wikis is the technical openness for unregistered and new collaborators. Anyone is allowed to edit, even without registration. I call this a technical openness, because socially Wikipedia is actually very closed: the edits of newcomers are very likely to be reverted.
In the Klexikon, you can edit only with an account. You can ask the project leader Michael for an account, which will be your real name. This makes vandalism rather unlikely. We believe that much of the negative work climate on Wikipedia and other wikis relates to the fact that vandalizing and mobbing is made rather easy. We also intend to be not so forbearing with trolls and others who disturb the work climate.
In general, everybody can ask for an account. We find it unlikely that many children will participate (childrens’ books are written by adults, too). Now we gave an account to the first minor, only with the Christian name, and in contact with a parent. We expect that minors will be treated with an appropriate delicacy by other collaborators.
What is the progress of the Klexikon?
During November we more or less build up the wiki as such, with the help of the ZUM people such as Karl Kirst. Since December 1st, 2014, we have collaborators and articles, by now even more than a handful. We produce ca. ten articles a week, and hope that this will increase with more collaborators. Many, but not all of them, have a Wikipedia background.
Our phase of experimenting will end in March 2014. By then, we will be able to present to Wikimedia Deutschland a concept of a childrens’ encyclopedia, based on our experiences with the Klexikon.
And after that? Of course, we hope that the Klexikon will have a flourishing community working on a ever growing pile of drafts and articles. The community will decide how to go on. Our host is aware that this might include a migration to the Wikimedia movement.
But until then, the Klexikon means to us, above all: learning, learning, learning. What content is really suitable for children, how to we attract constantly new collaborators, e.g. teachers or parents without Wikipedia background? We will go on with approaching school classes and receive more feedback from actuall pupils, and want to improve ourselves as writers in real life meetings.
Do you speak German and want to join? That’s great! Please contact Michael via kontakt@klexikon.de
On October 9th, 2014, I uploaded 48 articles to German Wikipedia, about the Revolution of 1848/1849 in Germany. I explain my motives on my user page and on a historians’ blog, and here also in English.
In 1848, revolutionary events occurred in many parts of Western and Central Europe, most notably in France, Germany, Italy and then Imperial Austria. Of course, Wikipedia has a lot of articles about these events. The quality shows a huge variety; sometimes even central articles (such as Frankfurter Nationalversammlung, the German national assembly) were hardly improved over the past six or eight years. They reached a certain quality early, some are even marked as “exzellent”, and a real makeover seemed to be too much work.
After I left the board of Wikimedia Nederland, in March this year, I wanted to write more articles again. While working on the article about the provisional constitutional order of 1848, I made up my mind about what needs to be done and how I wanted to contribute.
Ships of the German Imperial Fleet (1848-1852). Though I am not much of a navalist, I felt obliged to consider also this most visible result of the Revolution.
Why not writing or rewriting 48 articles about the Revolution? After very long articles such as Erste Kammer der Generalstaten I had learned from feedback that at least some readers found them way too long to consume. It is much better to distribute the knowledge via several articles with more general and more specific ones. This enables the reader to choose how much he wants to read, how substantial the information has to be.
In a speech for this year’s Historikertag in Göttingen, the major German historians’ convention, I put this into a larger perspective: what makes knowledge readable, what is the specialty of a reference work such as Wikipedia, in contrast to a general overview monograph? A reference work should consist of rather small units that can be consulted quickly. Encyclopedists have, for centuries, complained about readers who read ‘too little’ and are happy with a ‘ready reference’, while the encyclopedists wanted to provide a ‘depth in knowledge’ (hence the names for the two large parts of the 1970s Encyclopaedia Britannica; hence the hostility of some Wikipedians when ‘readability’ is discussed).
In my “Wikipedia 48” project, for example, I decided to write “from the bottom to the top”. After having written rather specific articles such as ‘Basic Rights of the German People’, ‘Imperial Election Law’, or ‘Imperial Citizenship’, ‘Imperial Head of State discussion’, it was quite easy to write the overviewing article ‘Frankfurt Imperial Constitution’. All those specific topics could be dealt with in a couple of short paragraphs, in a summarizing manner. Who wants to read more about the Basic Rights or the Citizenship, can click on the related link. We already had this distinction between overviewing and specific articles in Wikipedia, of course, but I made this a conscious decision a priori, not a technique of shortening a long article afterwards.
I implemented the 48 articles (and some more, for context) on October 9th, the 25th anniversary of the Monday demonstrations in communist East Germany in 1989. I uploaded them together at the same time, because they contained many links to each other and I did not want ‘trigger happy colleagues’ to delink temporary red links. This worked fine with almost all articles with the exception of especially one case (the Revolution article itself): another Wikipedian has prevented ‘his’ article, though unreferenced, to be overwritten. A more positive reaction were the many edits from friendly Wikipedians who corrected wiki markup and typos in the articles’ source code.
Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1852: Window scene at the entrance of the Imperial Regent [in Frankfort, July 1848]Reading and writing about the revolution era became a fascinating learning experience for myself. I thought of myself knowing German history of the 19th and 20th century rather well, but actually I did not remember much more than the National Assembly and the Imperial Constitution. Somewhere in the back of my head there was a shadow of an ‘Imperial Regent’ (Reichsverweser), but it never occured to me asking myself what Empire he might have been a part of.
I realized that we have a tremendous scholarly literature in German about the revolution era, but the overview works and text books provide only a very condensed version of what happened. Partially we still see a tendency to trivialize, even ridicule the Revolution and the revolutionaries, quite in line with the conservative propaganda of the 1850s. But the Revolution was not just ‘some political unrest’, the National Assembly was not a ‘talking shop of impractical professors’, the Constitution was not merely ‘a proposal that did not find enough support’, the National Assembly did not end because its members ‘lost interest’. Instead, the Revolution found a broad resonance in German society, it was crushed by force, and its legal (!) institutions were abolished unlawfully. The Constitution is still highly praised by modern law experts and sometimes even referred to by our German Constitutional Court.
There remains a lot to learn and to do about 19th century Germany.
Today, the public Dutch televison dedicated some minutes to ‘The approaching downfall of Wikipedia’. The alarmist view was mirrored by the ‘Internet specialist’ they had interviewed, and enriched with more nuances by an ‘Internet journalist’. I’d actually like to know on what these titles are based on, especially with regard to the ‘specialist’ who said that Wikipedia has to stop unless every reader contributes three dollars.
But, well, what to expect from people who cry ‘The end is near!’…
Now I am back from Mexico City, and the most urgent part of my homework is done:
Ziko's Blog 