Activities/Proposals/Information pack

Understanding reliability of online information information pack

Outline

A popular complaint about Wikipedia is that information is often unreliable. If users follow sources, they can see if it or not.

I propose making a website or CD for schools throughout the UK. It could discuss Wikipedia, how to understand its article's tags and how to follow and verify sources. It could also discuss alternative sources of information. This could also include others websites than Wikimedia projects - making it a more useful general resource.

It could have questions, be interactive etc and see users follow the verification of information.

Benefits

• Help address public's concerns that Wikimedia doesn't care about reliability.
• Help our readers find for themselves the reliability of information. This would mean people would use less unreliable information.
• It might be possible to link it with the National Curriculum, benefiting schools.

Financial requirements

The production and design of it of the information could be done in house. It could be linked with Wikiversity.

There are 4124 state secondary schools in the UK [1]. A list of all 5251's postal addresses (including private schools) costs £150 [2]. So sending them each a letter (without factoring franking or envelopes etc) would cost £1575.30. This is a costly option.

This site offers to email all secondaries for £150 [3]. I am not sure about response rate.

Perhaps agencies like Becta could push through a pack if we made one? Or we could ask people like the TES too.

Volunteering

A graphic designer would be needed.

A few volunteers would probably have to spend about 10 or 20 hours each making content and linking it with the curriculum.

In addition, some volunteers would have to spend a while organising the distribution.

Discussion

Thanks. Computerjoe 21:02, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Nice idea. Links in with the m:Wikimedia documents initiative and the work that Steve Virgin is doing at the moment - see Meetings/2009-05-19/IRC#.23wikimedia-uk-board 20:54. AndrewRT 23:10, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps this could link in with Wikipedia for Schools, in terms of distributing it? Obviously, a lot of the worries wouldn't be present there (currently, WfS has no references, nor article tags, but is a lot more reliable), but as a "How to use Wikipedia at home" section it might be useful. Mike Peel 18:24, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. Computerjoe 14:46, 2 July 2009 (UTC)