For those of you interested in the progress on the open kids dictionary project, we are moving ahead, and so I thought I’d give you a quick update:
- Starting point — After reviewing many open dictionary sources out there, we didn’t find any that met our needs in terms of content and licensing terms. As such, we decided to start with a public domain word list (which we are editing heavily) and write our own definitions. It is my hope that as a mass collaboration project, this will be a feasible endeavor.
- Infrastructure — We looked at a lot of different platforms to use for this (Wikibooks, WikiEducator, etc.). Our hope was to use one of these to capitalize on an existing community and to help build it. However, the issues of licenses and process (see below) ultimately caused us to decide to host this ourselves. And so, Brad has been busily working to create a platform for this using MySQL with a robust revision control system. The result looks a lot like a wiki, but with the advantages of more robust searching and some other nice benefits. For example, we’ll be able to easily export versions for a variety of platforms (handhelds, iPhones, Kindles, print, etc.).
- License — To give the maximum flexibility in how it is used, we are going to license this under CC-By (or possibly even public domain). We don’t want to restrict people with non-commercial or share alike requirements. (This obviously affected which content and platform we could use as well.)
- Process — User-created collaborate content is great, but for schools, it also poses problems. In the US, much user-created content is blocked/filtered because of concerns about inappropriate content. While I don’t agree with this approach, I do sympathize with the problem of community pressures against inappropriate content, which wikis certainly breed through vandalism. As such, for this project, we will at some point be publishing a “frozen” version that has been screened for appropriateness.
The goal is to have working version of this up in the next month or so. Stay tuned for more info, and let us know if you’re interested in being a part of this project.
Kids dictionary update