Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Australian Schools Selection

The Australian Schools Selection is a project to augment and enhance the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for schools offering to make it more compatible with Australian school curriculums. It is a project of WikiProject Australia.

Project Scope and Rationale

The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection of articles is an excellent resource, that furthers the Wikimedia goal of free knowledge, while also addressing some of the concerns that teachers and educators have about the "main" Wikipedia site. It contains no vandalism, the articles are of a high quality, and the articles selected are suitable for minors.

However, the existing selection has been tailored towards the UK curriculum, and as such there are a number of topics that are either poorly represented, or not represented at all. These gaps in the encyclopædia could prove a barrier to widespread adoption of the selection in Australian schools. Therefore, it is proposed that we augment the existing selection to improve coverage of Australian topics and other subjects covered in Australian curriculums that might not be adequately covered.

Principles

• The existing selection is not deficient in any way, it is merely tailored to a particular audience (UK schools). This is not a project to radically overhaul the selection, it is merely intended to add some additional material to give improved coverage of Australian topics, in order to cater to a different audience (Australian schools).
• Topics selected should be appropriate to our audience, that is, school aged children. Topics that may be controversial given the age group (for instance: sex and drugs) should be avoided, or, where appropriate, scrutinised extra carefully to make sure that the content is appropriate for children and not likely to prove a sticking point preventing the adoption of the selection.
• There should be an emphasis on well written content (GA and FA class articles), and articles on necessary topics that have major problems should be either improved dramatically or deferred to a future version of this selection.

Suggested Topics

From a browse through the existing project, here are some topics I think should be covered more thoroughly:

• Australian Prime Ministers and Politicians (John Howard is already included, I cannot see any reason why each PM should not be included, and probably every state premier as well).
• Australian Sportspeople (The Invincibles is an aspiring featured topic).
• Australian Geography
• History of Indigenous Australia (care should be taken to make sure any such articles are strictly NPOV - this is a potentially touchy political issue and a seemingly innocuous word can cause offense or accusations of bias)
• Australian history, particularly in relation to European and Asian migration
• Australian infrastructure development - and the government's leading role.
• Australian industry or the lack of it.
• Australian extractive industries.

See Also: Article Assessment Workspace

Other improvements that might be possible

• I feel that the navigation system on the existing project is a bit clunky, it's hard to find an article sometimes without drilling down on a whole lot of pictures and trying to guess where content might be; the inclusion of a whole bunch of wacky redirects makes some pages a little confusing at first (like this one). A straight alphabetic index without redirects, linked straight from the front page, would probably be helpful.

• The ability to search would be a good addition which I did not see in the UK SOS effort.