Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection/How to help

This page is intended to help people who are offering to help with the 2008 Wikipedia DVD Selection. This page is written both for experienced Wikipedia contributers and for volunteers helping SOS Children.

The last (frozen) 2007 wikipedia can be browsed at http://schools-wikipedia.org The 2007 Wikipedia Selection was a huge success with we think at least a million users (see project page). It is organised by topics here: http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/index/subject.htm

Choosing Articles

The individual articles have been taken from some historical version of the relevant wikipedia article and "cleaned up" by a script which removes some sections which are inappropriate for an offline stand alone version for children. If you look at any article on Wikipedia you will see a "history" tag near the top of the page which contains past versions (including the most current one). A bare article name is not very useful to us since by the time we go to get it there is a chance it may have been vandalised. The Url chosen from the historical version gives us the same text you can see, looking like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baroque&oldid=186354209 and all we need to identify it is the last bit: Baroque&oldid=186354209

The new version will be generated using a script which updates the articles whenever a more recent historical version is listed and uses the same clean up. So the first thing we want is lists of articles like Baroque&oldid=186354209 which can update or be added to the DVD. You should note any sections which you think may not be suitable for inclusion (e.g. stub sections, empty sections, lists of things which are unlikely to be on the DVD, non-child content) —