Wikipedia for Schools

You may have noticed that the information online isn't always accurate or indeed appropriate for our pupils. I was able to demonstrate this a few years back when during an ICT lesson, we were using Wikipedia to research capital cities. The first sentence under the entry for Paris declared the city to be the stinkiest in the world, and recommended visitors to hold their noses due to the stench. I had to explain to the class that someone had edited the page to make this crude joke, and that indeed it was a very easy thing to do and that we couldn't always trust Wikipedia - or indeed any other website. This is still true today, but there is now Wikipedia for schools which may be more trustworthy here.

 From the website: This selection of articles from Wikipedia matches the UK National Curriculum and can be used by school children around the world. 6000 articles, 26 million words and 50,000 images make Wikipedia for Schools bigger than Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia put together! Wikipedia is great, but it wasn’t designed with the National Curriculum in mind. And because anyone can edit it, articles sometimes get vandalised. That’s why we’ve put together this special collection to make learning as easy and safe as it can be. Here at SOS Children, we’ve checked all the articles, tidied them up a bit, and put them together by school subject. SOS Children ( www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk) is a charity which works around the world to help children in need. As well as Wikipedia articles, we’ve collected pages from the SOS Children website, so you can learn more about the work we do in 125 countries around the world.

Definitely worth a look!