Wikipedia:Wikimedia School Team

The Wikimedia School Team is a group of users dedicated to fostering a positive relationship between schools in the United States and the Wikimedia Foundation. To this end, the Team will undertake projects that make the content of Wikimedia wikis available in a usable form for an educational environment. This is the way to help schools gain the following:


 * 1) A resource for students to gain knowledge of where they live. This includes buildings, highways, the city or town history, and some of the major events that have happened in their area. There would also be notable locations and places that would be included.
 * 2) A basis for teachers of these schools to put more trust in Wikipedia. (This would be done by having professionals review the subject and make sure all factual information and sources are correct before production of resources.)

Wikipedia in the Classroom:Special Distributions (First Project)
We are interested in producing CD-ROMs that (benefited by the Wikimedia Foundation) help students and teachers achieve the above goals. The standard procedure would be contacting Wikimedia Foundation and participating schools to see if they are interested in helping with the process. The second step would be to come up with the correct articles, have them expanded to correct form, and proofread and checked by professionals. These articles, during the third step, would be produced and shipped to the participating schools. This would then achieve the aforementioned goals and help students learn in places where learning isn't always the easiest.

Article Selection
Articles included in the CD would be relevant to each school. Choosing which articles to include is one of the hardest parts. Our remedy for this is to start up a bot, which would search a certain string of words and hand-pruning the articles to be included under the following criteria:


 * 1) Notability
 * 2) Relativity
 * 3) Article Status
 * 4) School/Foundation preferences

These will then help separate the correct articles from the rest of the pack. These would then be expanded to the condition where no more can be changed, and then it would be possible to start getting them proofread and added to the CDs as we go along.

Our Example
The example we wish to bring up is New York City. New York City is a large municipality, made up of 5 boroughs with over 200 school districts. The schools would highly benefit from these CD-ROMs to help the students give them good knowledge of what they should know basically. Some of our examples include:


 * 1) The 5 boroughs
 * 2) History of New York City
 * 3) People (Mayors,Governors, and other notable residents and/or highly named people)
 * 4) Highways and how they were built
 * 5) Local attractions
 * 6) The schools themselves.
 * 7) Some of the local hamlets and such
 * 8) Rivers and bays

Of course, this is not everything going into one CD-ROM, but its giving the reader a better idea of what they are learning. These would also change depending where the CDs are going.

The Wikimedia Foundation's support

 * Cary Bass told me (Mitchazenia) on IRC that as long as we follow the foundation's mission to go ahead with the project and we have, or will have, their support. So I can declaritively say, let's get started getting professionals and writers together. Mitch 32(UP) 10:50, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Conclusion
It is our belief that this project is highly important and will benefit all stakeholders. We wish to make this project a success, so then we can have future types like this. And, who knows, we could go global, not just the United States alone. Thanks to any participants who wish to help with the process.

Participants

 * Mitchazenia (talk) (Co-founder)
 * Geoff Plourde (talk) (Co-founder)
 * Gimme danger (talk)
 * VanTucky (talk)
 * Martin Walker (talk) (I can only help out a little but please keep me updated)
 * Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles (talk)

Places and participating schools
Sandyston-Walpack Consolidated School District (K-6) & Kittatinny Regional High School (7-12) - Contact in progress. Potential Content