When Nina and I got married in 2009, the most thoughtful present we received was that of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (I wrote about it in my Spanish blog). After I told Jimmy about the difficulties my foundation educ.ar (whose mission is to improve education through the use of technology) was encountering in securing internet access for the many computers we had distributed to schools, Jimmy had a very special surprise for us at our wedding: an offline version of the Spanish Wikipedia.
Rather than being a present for Nina and me, it’s really a gift to all those kids in Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries who have no means of connecting to the internet, or only have very limited access. And now, more than one year later, educ.ar is finally ready to deliver those DVDs to schools in Argentina.
At first glance this might not seem like a big achievement, but it is. As Jimmy explains in his blog, the difficulty is not getting the content on a DVD (it fits easily), but rather developing a simple offline reader that provides basic search and display functionality, using only free/open source software. Just think of the millions of cross-links that make discovering new information so easy and enjoyable on Wikipedia.
The DVD educ.ar will begin distributing this year consists of three parts. First, the offline Wikipedia itself, called “CDpedia”. Creating the CDpedia itself was only possible thanks to the efforts of the Python Argentina team. In addition, there’s a theoretical framework where experts comment on the value of using Wikipedia in the classroom and explain Wikipedia’s value in an educational and social context that is increasingly being influenced by information technology and is undergoing a permanent transformation. Lastly, the DVD contains general tutorials and a guideline showing how to effectively use Wikipedia in a classroom setting. Here is the online version of this project.
And so, what started out as a wedding gift from a single (and very special) person will now bring a world of knowledge to thousands of school kids all over Argentina, and later to even more people in every Spanish-speaking country. I couldn’t think of a better present.
Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars
No Comments
Elitre on June 15, 2011 ·
Somewhere on the pages of the two projects there should be at least a short notice about the license of Wikipedia itself, which back in 2008 was the GFDL.
Jimmy Wales on June 16, 2011 ·
Martin, you’re very lovely but give me far too much credit! You did thank all the right people as well, and I want to second that thanks to all of them.
All I did was pull people together for a couple of meetings and cheer them on. The real credit goes to the people who made this happen! (Including you!)
Anthony Hess on June 21, 2011 ·
That’s fantastic news. In the long term, is there any process in place to send annual updates (or something similar)?
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Alejandro J. Cura on June 15, 2011 ·
Hi Martín,
we are so happy that this is moving forward, and that our humble CDpedia free software project is about to be distributed to all of Argentina. Thanks a lot for your contribution thru educ.ar.
PS: It would be great if you could add a link to the project in your post, so interested people can try it and contribute: http://cdpedia.python.org.ar/
cheers!
—
alecu, from the CDpedia team