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12 November 2007

SOS Children’s Village to provide Free Encyclopedia

Hole in the Wall Education Ltd. (HiWEL) has joined hands with SOS Children's Village, the world's largest orphan and abandoned children charity, to provide Wikipedia for the Learning Stations in India and African countries. Supported by sponsors and donors worldwide, SOS Children's Charity provides a new family for over 60,000 children in 123 countries and helps almost a million more people through their projects around the world.

Dr Andrew Cates, CEO of SOS Children UK said: "Wikipedia offers a fantastic learning resource. We are delighted to have been able to play a part in increasing the number of children who will be able to benefit from it. We are indebted to the volunteers in our offices and on Wikipedia who helped check articles and to the Wikipedia community for their help with this project." This initiative is warmly encouraged and proudly supported by Wikimedia Foundation.

The 2007 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It is about the size of a 15 volume encyclopedia (24,000 images and 14 million words). Volunteers at Wikipedia have also suggested more than a thousand other articles considered valuable and relevant to this project which SOS Children volunteers have checked and tidied up. The selection is vast, and covers core subjects but does not try to be uniformly detailed. This content can easily be run on in remote HiWEL Learning Stations where Internet access is still a distant problem.

HiWEL gratefully acknowledges the SOS Children’s Village for their support and their agreement to our use of the Wikipedia Selection. HiWEL, in its endeavor to provide relevant content to the Learning stations, is very keen to work with SOS Children’s Village to extend and update the Wikipedia content periodically.