Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection

The 2007 DVD was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall project, thousands of downloads and discs and around 14,000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version.

Downloads started on 15 October 2008. The 2008/9 version has 33,716 images, 19.8m words and 5502 articles. The article list has gone up to 5500 articles with about 1500 added and 600 removed from the 2007 version as more relevant articles for kids have reached adequate quality thresholds. Pretty much all of them have been updated to more recent versions since the 2007 version. They are still sorted by curriculum topics with some portal pages for curriculum subjects added. This will still be free by any route.

As well as updating checked content and improving the selection, this time some portal pages have been included such as which closely match UK curriculum subjects. A was made to coincide with the availability of downloads.

Articles which were listed on the Version 0.7 selectionbot pages and previous editions were all considered by volunteers. All submitted articles then go through a clean-up script to remove Fair Use images, all sentences whose only purpose was to link to unincluded articles (e.g. "see also"), stubs and editorial content, and sections containing material unsuitable for children and external links. Where articles had been vandalised or contained questionable material the most recent good version was used.

General article quality is improving but hand checking is still needed because of vandalism. Some articles on really basic topics (like Farm for example) are still disappointing though.

We have been asked by several other WP projects to explain the process of selecting article versions from the article history in more detail.

For 2007 we asked for lists of URLs of good historical article versions from page histories. For 2008 as we made extensive use of volunteers for this project, we set up things for them in an easy to use system.

1) Lists of proposed articles were taken from community proposals, the Version 1.0 lists of articles, working directly from school curriculum topic lists and the 2006 WP.

3) The browsing feature allows you to check whether this article is definitely the most suitable one (for example do you want Great Pyramid of Giza or Giza Necropolis) and add related articles for example on info boxes if they are relevant and not included.

4) The scroll down menus on the left hand side then allow the topic to be placed in any number of categories for the automatically generated category index based on the relevant schools subject.

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