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Vikidia:About

From Vikidia, the encyclopedia for 8 to 13-year-old children that everybody can make better
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Vikidia is an encyclopedic project, based on wiki technology, primarily targeted at 8-13-year-old readers and contributors.

The website is independent from the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia. It was launched in November 2006 in French and in 2013 in English. Vikidia is handled by the Association Vikidia, a non-profit organization located in France. It is hosted by OVH.

Vikidia is an online encyclopedia in English, and is free and participative. Its content is written with 8-13-year-old children in mind. Anyone, young or not, can improve both its encyclopedic articles and its layout and organization. See Vikidia:For children or by children?.

Vikidia also exists in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Catalan, Basque, Sicilian, Armenian and Greek.

Vikidia is not complete. There are a lot of stub articles! It is still possible for everyone to fix, improve or add information. That's how the website gets better.

One can use Vikidia to prepare a presentation, but also to find information on euros or to know the weight of a gas. When people add information, they can understand better and improve their English.

You can, together with children of your class, another school, or from their home in any country, add information to Vikidia. During the work, you can talk to each other through the website.

Vikidia is mostly meant for and written by you. Of course, the teachers may help us! What is written can be read by anybody in the world! The more children help us, the faster Vikidia will grow into a super website with a lot of information.

Who is it aimed at?

Vikidia is written for children who are between 8 and 13 years old. Nevertheless, it can be used by other groups such as Simple English Wikipedia, adults and children with learning difficulties, people who are learning English, or simply seeking a simple presentation of an issue they do not know. Everyone can find something to learn here because the articles are supposed to be easy to read but also comprehensive and informative. A Vikidia article could even serve as a simple and synthetic version of a Wikipedia article if theirs is too long or too difficult!

However, although there are many groups who can potentially benefit from Vikidia, our top priority must always be to make sure that Vikidia is appropriate for and readable by children between 8 and 13 years old.

Who are the participants?

See also: Vikidia:For children or by children?

Everybody can participate (you just need to register). There is no limitation related to the age of participants. Editors can be children of the reader target age, teenagers, adults or even students learning English as a foreign language. One important objective is nevertheless to encourage children to get involved in its writing, as it could both be more attractive to them to be active, and have a strong educational interest in a writing to learn approach.

It is not easy to check the real age of a user. Therefore, we do not give special rights or roles on the wiki based on a user's declared age. That makes the first edits easier for them (no need to justify one's age and for a sysop to check it). If the chance is for an article to grow fast, we want to take it. We bet that collective writing, just like wiki management (technical issues, spelling and content checking) by different people should be interesting for everyone.

Vikidia still has the aim to be a real encyclopedia: it is not only a place for writing exercises. We hope that these two goals can be covered at the same time. It could motivate kids to know that their work will stay, be read and improved. Besides, the rules needed to achieve the first goal can be used to reach the other one. Teens can still edit it and learn from this writing work.

When this wiki was being launched, participants were mainly users of Wikipedia who had previously been involved or just watching the Wikipedia junior project. New users come quite regularly since then.

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Source : this page has been adapted from the page « Vikidia:About » on Vikidia in French. (Authors list)