Campaign Raises Funds To Send Wikipedia Readers To Kids Without Internet 97
Eloquence writes "Remember the WikiReader? It was pitched as a device that would contain the text of the entire English Wikipedia, and run on two AAA batteries for months. Unfortunately it was sold to the wrong audience: people who already have smartphones, tablets and laptops. At a cost of $20 per device, Aislinn Dewey and Victor Grigas (who works for Wikimedia) are trying to raise funds to buy up the company's inventory and ship WikiReaders to kids in places without Internet connectivity."
This does work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Same kids (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do people on slashdot feel the need to make points about things of which they have no information?
It's a web forum.
Re:Yes, spread the false information. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. People who dismiss Wikipedia because of its inaccuracies often forget about what we usually did *before* Wikipedia existed: We made stuff up based on our intuitions, *maybe* talked about it at a coffee shop with a small number of our friends, and believed it as fact. Sure, if we were doing academic research, we were more rigorous (and that's improved, too, IMHO), but how often did that happen? Now, with portable devices that can access the WWW, our first reponse when we're not sure about something is often to look it up.
I can't emphasize this enough: Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.
So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.