Talk:One encyclopedia per child

Culturally inappropriate heading images

Three of the images in the alphabet heading page are culturally inappropriate in some countries and should be replaced.

G - Gun - these weapons are illegal in the United Kingdom and it is considered inappropriate to use them in an educational context outside of anti-crime lessons.

P - Pig - this is considered by Muslims and Jews to be an unclean animal and children are discouraged from toys, books, etc. which contain pig characters or images. In the UK, Islam is a common religion, in the USA, Judaism is common. Best to choose something else for P.

D - Dog - in Arab culture, the dog is seen as an unclean animal. Again, there is a significant Arab immigrant community in both the USA and the UK. In addition, English is used in education in Arab countries, especially Iraq. Again, better to use some other image.

In reply

As a result of very local criticism earlier on, we had removed the bullets, and are still seeking something better than G -Gun, also because it is "sexist". Other ideas we have seen are G - Grapes; Gorilla; Goat; Girl; Giraffe; Gecko; Glass; Gift; but no three letter words except for Gap, Gas, Gel, Gem, Gin, Gnu, Gum, and Gym which will create problems with finding images. We have chosen "Gift"

The next choices would be P - Peg or Pen. We have chosen Peg. We have elected not to change "Dog". --155.232.250.35 00:25, 9 November 2006 (EST)

I think Gecko works better for G, as for D he's right Dog would not be the best choice here, Duck would probably be a much better neutral fit. Asian countries don't really do a lot of Milk drinking do they? And how many countries actually have Yo-Yos? For M I suggest Monkey, and for Y I suggest Yak. As for P I assume is a clothespin? Maybe since these are children animals and shapes should be used whenever possible, the less abstract the better so that they learn it and forget it and don't have to re-acquire the context everytime they access the OEPC interface. For P I suggest a Pelican facing left. --Basique 10:41, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Single theme for alphabet images

Why not stick to a single theme (animals or household items) for the alphabet images? It would make it easier to identify even for non native speakers (eg: learning a second language). Also, when the alphabet is "translated" to other languages, having a common theme for the images would allow a more uniform look for the project.

In reply

A theme of animals was considered, but it introduces "foreign" animals such as Y - Yak. A problem with household objects is that in developing sountries, the implements in the hut are not so diverse. A similar look for different languages is at the bottom of the list of priorities in what we have discovered to be a highly over-constrained system. --Olpcme 14:51, 19 September 2006 (EDT)

Browsing Method

Although the alphabet is the traditional organisation method for print encyclopedias it has not been used on Wikipedia and I'm not convinced it is the best scheme to use for OEPC.

I suggest the main page have big navigation buttons, as here. The top row to include general functions

• Random Page,
• Browse by subject (leading to Category hierarchy),
• Search.

Below that buttons leading to Portal pages for each of the main subject areas:

• Science
• History
• The World
• Mathematics
• Biography
• Art and Culture

All with lots of hyper links so that you can arrive at the information you want via various routes.

In reply

We have four spare squares on the corners which could be used for alternative accesses. Possible buttons are "Surprise" "Subjects" "Search" and "Spare". The icons could have a flat diagonal design / \ and \ / to hint that these are different or be 3-D shaded as buttons to indicate that they are different. --Olpcme 14:50, 19 September 2006 (EDT)

Possible method to contain the full wikipedia

I had an idea - if I understand correctly these laptops will form a network and be helping routing each other's data. if that's the case - perhaps we can distribute the encyclopedia between them.

all laptops have the basic summary version of the encyclopedia as a fallback that always works - and also have random bits of the media and appendices so that together several laptops contain the full thing.

cheers, yair