The Wikipedia Selection is a DVD selection of articles taken from Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, and was first produced in April 2006. There have been two major revisions since then, the 2007 version in April 2007 and the 2008/9 version in October 2008. It was the first available English language CD version of Wikipedia. The disc is produced by the charity SOS Children.
The DVD's content totals twenty million words and 34,000 images, equivalent to a twenty volume encyclopaedia. The DVD contained 5,500+ articles of particular interest to schools or children and is sorted by UK National Curriculum subjects (for example; Art, Citizenship, Geography, Mathematics and so on). The articles were manually selected from the English Wikipedia by volunteers working for SOS Children, checked for suitability for children and cleaned by hand and script. This additional step helps overcome what are perceived by educators as the problems with Wikipedia.[1]
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Distribution has been by download on BitTorrent peer to peer network, and by free DVD from the charity offices. Partnerships with the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Hole in the Wall have seen it distributed in South Africa and India as well as copies being available globally via the offices of SOS Children UK's umbrella organisation, SOS Children's Villages worldwide.[2] Although the project is mainly offline, the online browsable version at http://schools-wikipedia.org gets around 7000 unique IP visitors a day rising to over 20,000 in the run up to new editions.[3] There is also a Plucker database version of the 2007 version to carry on an SD card for Palm Pilot.[4]
Because this distribution was not initially an official Wikimedia project, some changes had to be made for legal reasons.
The Wikipedia puzzle-globe logo was not included in the 2006 edition as SOS Children did not have permission to use it. Permission has since been granted and subsequent editions uses the Wikipedia logo.
The only content added was a small box notice on about 130 pages which have a particular relevance to SOS Children (e.g. many of the 125 countries where SOS works).[5]
In addition to the Wikipedia General Disclaimer, the 2006 CD carries the following notice:
| “ | 2006 WikiPedia[sic] CD Selection is provided without profit for the general education of children, and is intended to be fit for that purpose. It is NOT intended to guide chemistry experiments, as a guide to poisonous plants, as a medical guide or to be used in any way as a basis for behaviour. | ” |
The 2008/9 release has a much more comprehensive disclaimer:
| “ | This is a selection of articles from Wikipedia, and content from SOS Children
The selection may be copied in its entirety for non-commercial purposes, but restrictions apply to other use of content. In general, the content from Wikipedia, except for the Wikipedia logo itself, is subject to the GNU Free Documentation License, or in the case of some images other licenses as detailed on the image pages, which may be found by clicking on the image concerned. The Wikipedia logo is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation and may not be used without their permission. The original authors or creators of content from Wikipedia may be found by going to the article in the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) with the same article name and tracing content via the page history. The creators of images are detailed in the image page which can be found by clicking on each image. The content from SOS Children's Villages may not be used in any form (except intact as a unit with this content) without permission. Please contact us if you want to copy it (in the case of certain photographs SOS Children's Villages itself does not own copyright outright). This 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection is provided without profit for the general education of children, and is intended to be fit for that purpose. It is NOT intended to guide chemistry experiments, as a guide to poisonous plants, as a medical guide or to be used in any way as a basis for behaviour. Volunteers have looked through the content but no party involved in this selection takes any responsibility or liability for the content. If you find any errors please report them to wikipedia-cd@soschildren.org and we will correct them as soon as possible. |
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Although the CD selection was produced outside of Wikimedia, the project served as proof of concept for upcoming official releases of Wikipedia on hard copy as well as their distribution and the conversion of online to offline articles.
"Official" Wikimedia releases will use the naming pattern "Wikipedia Release Version [...]" to avoid confusion with the SOS Children's versions which will be named [date]-Wikipedia-CD-Selection.