{"id":43,"date":"2007-10-31T17:05:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-01T00:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/43"},"modified":"2007-10-31T17:05:57","modified_gmt":"2007-11-01T00:05:57","slug":"kids-simple-dictionarynot-as-simple-as-i-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/43","title":{"rendered":"Kids simple dictionary&#8230;not as simple as I thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing some work on the idea of creating a free open <a href=\"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/35\" target=\"_blank\">kids simple dictionary<\/a>.  Two questions that have been central are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>What open dictionary would be best to use as a starting point?<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>How could this be hosted to best facilitate mass collaboration?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To look at the first question, I started by putting together <a href=\"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/wiki\/index.php\/Dictionary#Kids_Simple_Dictionary\" target=\"_blank\">a list of what&#8217;s available<\/a>. As it turns out, there are not as many choices as I had thought. There is the WordNet\/Princeton one, Wiktionary, Webster&#8217;s 1913 dictionary, and then a variety of adaptations of those. (If anyone knows of a gem I missed, PLEASE let me know!)<\/p>\n<p>I then chose 10 words basically at random that should be in any good elementary level dictionary and looked them up in each of these dictionaries. <a href=\"http:\/\/spreadsheets.google.com\/ccc?key=pQpb60Fa5MetiHr5OnDJDPw&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\">The results are here<\/a>. Ugh!<\/p>\n<p>The bad news is that only a few of these definitions are at all usable for a kids&#8217; dictionary. Almost all would need significant editing. (I&#8217;ve used Noah on the Palm, but have steered clear of it with schools because of the objectionable adult language. I didn&#8217;t really realize until now how completely inappropriate the general language level\/readability is for kids though.)<\/p>\n<p>Wiktionary and Webster&#8217;s 1913 are the most verbose and would need the most editing. <a href=\"http:\/\/wordnet.princeton.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\">WordNet<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/msowww.anu.edu.au\/~ralph\/OPTED\/\" target=\"_blank\">Online Plain Text English Dictionary<\/a> both seem more reasonable as a starting place. However, the amount of editing required will still be mammoth. We really will need mass collaboration to do this&#8230;.which brings me to the second question.<\/p>\n<p>In some ways, I would really like this dictionary to live in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikibooks.org\" target=\"_blank\">Wikibooks<\/a>. This is because (1) I like Wikibooks; (2) I think Wikibooks is an effective platform for mass collaboration; and (3) I would like to bring more people to Wikibooks for the benefit of other projects there. However, there are some issues. One of the big ones is that as a school-appropriate dictionary, we would want at some point to &#8220;freeze&#8221; a copy to ensure that we are putting out a safe, accurate, high quality product. Wikibooks isn&#8217;t really set up for this (though wikis can be designed to accommodate this). In addition, MediaWiki doesn&#8217;t handle version control or forking (though it does handle revision control very well).<\/p>\n<p>A tentative solution to this that I had thought of was to put it in Wikibooks and then at some point slurp it off to a database hosted on K12 Handhelds that would be restricted to a small group of editors for final editing and publication. Interestingly, this is similar to an idea that <a href=\"http:\/\/xixtas-open.blogspot.com\/2007\/10\/open-letter-to-wikimedia-foundation.html\" target=\"_blank\">xixtas has proposed in a letter to the Wikimedia folks<\/a>. He goes a step better though by suggesting that the &#8220;controlled&#8221; copies be hosted on a Wikimedia site www.wikijunior.org. I think this is a great idea for all kinds of reasons. I hope that Wikimedia gives this serious consideration. Of course with all the content being GFDL, I guess we could do this ourselves if we didn&#8217;t mind hosting it.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s where I am with all this. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing some work on the idea of creating a free open kids simple dictionary. Two questions that have been central are: What open dictionary would be best to use as a starting point? How could this be hosted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6mlV-H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}