Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection/How to help

This page is intended to help people who are offering to help with the 2008 Wikipedia DVD Selection. This page is written both for experienced Wikipedia contributers and for volunteers helping SOS Children.

The last (frozen) 2007 wikipedia can be browsed at http://schools-wikipedia.org The 2007 Wikipedia Selection was a huge success with we think at least a million users (see project page).

It is organised by topics here: http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/index/subject.htm

Choosing Articles
The individual articles have all been taken from some historical version of the relevant wikipedia article and "cleaned up" by a script which removes red links, non-free images and some sections which are inappropriate for an offline stand alone version for children. To update or add an article, you look at the article on Wikipedia where you will see a "history" tag near the top of the page which contains past versions (including the most current one). A bare article name is not very useful to us since by the time we go to get it there is a chance it may have been vandalised.

The url chosen from the historical version gives us the same text you can see, looking like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baroque&oldid=186354209 and all we need to identify it is the last bit: Baroque&oldid=186354209. Please choose versions of articles which are not in the middle or an edit war and have not been vandalised and add them to Wikipedia_CD_Selection/additions_and_updates. You should note any sections which you think may not be suitable for inclusion (e.g. stub sections, empty sections, lists of things which are unlikely to be on the DVD, non-child content) on Wikipedia_CD_Selection/section_excludes. Don't worry if you cannot get the syntax right: we will manually view these pages before the script runs them.

The new version will be generated using a script which updates the articles whenever a more recent historical version is listed and uses the same clean up.

Checking Articles
If you are not comfortable working on Wikipedia project pages contact us about volunteering as an article checker. Most people take a subject from the subject index like say Africa and send back a list of things they think need review in about half the articles (e.g. say "are you sure you want to include the article Defaka it seems very obscure").

Other tasks
We also need help sorting articles by school topic etc but this is best done directly into a database off-wiki so contact BozMo and offer.

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