Type of site Wiki Created by Mathias Damour | Owner Association Vikidia Website www.vikidia.org | |
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Available in French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Russian and English Slogan(s) The encyclopedia for children (8-13 years) that everyone can improve. | ||
Vikidia is an online encyclopedia wiki for children that runs on MediaWiki software. It has been available in French, Spanish, and Dutch (as WikiKids) for years, while the Italian, Russian and English versions were only created recently. The newest one is the Catalan Vikidia.
Contents
The site focuses on presenting articles suitable for primary school children from eight to thirteen years of age. Most of its users are children, though there is no age restriction. Due to its use of simple language, it may also be a useful resource for those learning other languages, though the Simple English Wikipedia, which has a similar principle, is more geared towards mature learners of English rather than younger readers.
History
Mathias Damour, using the pseudonym Astimays, launched Vikidia on November 17, 2006. The site was inspired by, but is independent of, the Dutch-language WikiKids, which was created by the volunteer-driven Stichting WikiKids (WikiKids Foundation) and hosted by Kennisnet Ict op school. As of 2016, WikiKids had more than 18,000 articles and more than 208,000 registered users.
The French version reached the threshold of one thousand articles in April 2007, two thousand in September 2007, 3500 in February 2008, 10000 in July 2011, and 15000 in October 2013.
The Spanish version was created in May 2008, the Italian one in 2011, the Russian one in 2012, and the Catalan one in 2015.
An English version was launched on February 28, 2014. It is now free for anyone to edit.
Principles
At its inception, Vikidia allowed both registered and non-registered IP accounts to edit the site. It is still the case in January 2014, with the exception of uploading files (e.g. images) which is reserved to registered users. However, since May 2014, the use of captchas has been obligatory to make any edit for unregistered and recently registered users, which considerably hinders editing, even for non-vandal contributors. (This does not seem to be the case in January 2016 for minor edits in the English Vikidia.)
In each linguistic version of Vikidia, media files stored both locally and on Wikimedia Commons are directly usable in Vikidia articles.
All contributions are licensed under a CC-BY-SA and GNU Free Documentation License dual license.
Educational use
Vikidia encourages use in the classroom for school projects and research. Various schools in France, Belgium, and Quebec have involved Vikidia in their curriculums.