One encyclopedia per child

One Encyclopedia Per Child Mainly in Simple English

Keywords

OLPC OEPC

Background

The purpose of this page is to encourage the quick generation of good content for initially populating the One Laptop Per Child. Many scholars are self taught primarily from their early exposure to an encyclopedia at an early age. The encyclopedia gave them a good start in life. How much more useful will a hyperlinked encyclopedia be to the home of a child in a developing country.

Viewpoint taken

A bottom-up approach is to content development is to decide the appropriate entries (headings) and to find suitable articles for inclusion. A top-down approach would categorise all of the suitable and desireable knowledge into a tree of knowledge, Dewey or Library of Congress style. We believe that the bottom-up approach is more pragmatic, and that a top-down approach can follow.

Quotable quote

A proof-of-concept protype has been built and has shown that the OEPC can just fit on the OLPC.

Contribution

By merging the entry headings from suitable printed encyclopedias, and omitting obsolete or non neutral-point-of-view entries, the alphabetical index to the OEPC is quickly created. Then using these entry headings to pull in articles from the Simple English Wikipedia, the OEPC is rapidly built. When no suitable entry exists in the Simple English version, the article is retrieved instead from the Full English Wikipedia, and marked in bold to indicate that it is advanced material.

Limitations

This article is only concerned with the English Content. The English version is the prototype. Spanish and other languages can certainly follow suit. Updates are possible at a school linked to the Web. Also the OEPC can be flushed out of the flash memory when the memory is required for other purposes, and reloaded at a school connected to the Web.

Relevance

The OLPC can be made into the OEPC.

Advances

Volunteers are required to extend the prototype into a full OEPC, ready for downloading to the OLPC.

Summary

One Encyclopedia Per Child is arguably the most important content that can be pre-loaded on the One Laptop Per Child.

Links (on various wikis)

• Hardware: wiki.laptop.org/wiki/Hardware_specification [[1]]
• Software task list: pedia.media.mit.edu/wiki/OLPC_software_task_list[[2]]
• OEPC prototype: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:One_Encyclopedia_Per_Child [[3]]
• OEPC Project Proposal: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#

One_Encyclopedia_Per_Child_mainly_in_Simple_English [[4]]