List of wikis for children

This page provides a list of wikis in the world that have a relation to children. These are actual wikis. Another list, Childrens' Wikipedia, deals with previous attempts to create a new Wikimedia wiki. A Wikimedia wiki (or WMF wiki, or Sister project of Wikipedia) would try to adopt wikis that already exist. 'Wikikids' was the working title for one of these attempts, but this is also the name of an existing wiki in the Netherlands.

Please have in mind that a wiki for children can look very differently and have very different goals. There are mainly two types. Content oriented wikis want to create good content that can serve as an encyclopedia. Education oriented wikis are learning platforms; here the experience of the (young) contributor is most important. Some wikis try a mix of both concepts.

WikiKids.nl (Dutch)[edit]

Wikikids.nl (Licence GFDL + CC-BY-SA 3.0): in Dutch, started in March 2006, 31077 articles in November 2020, registration not required

Wikikids.nl is a Dutch language encyclopedia for 8-13 years old children. It's works similarly to the present proposal. This wiki is backed by Kennisnet, a public (semi-governmental) organization dedicated to ICT-innovation for compulsory education. In its actual form most of the content is written by children an teenagers, either in the context of educational class projects or at home. It should be noted, however, that adults may help in the process.

The group of teachers that started WikiKids in the Netherlands is interested to talk about WikiKids as a Wikimedia wiki. But they are concerned about the consequences for them. The group may not agree to those consequences (such as policy changes to the wiki). They would find it unacceptable if the WMF would create a wiki in Dutch that was in competition to the existing wiki. Should the WMF have a wiki for children, the group if the existing wiki could imagine to have links to it, such as they already exist to the French Vikidia.

Vikidia (French, Italian, Spanish, English, ...)[edit]

Vikidia (License: same as Wikipedia, ie. GFDL + CC-BY-SA 3.0) Vikidia was primarily opened in French. Currently, 10 languages version exist, thought of very unequal development : french, spanish, italian, english and others. It was opened by a french Wikipedia user (Astirmays) and is now own by an association (under French law) of which Wikimédia France is a member. Its concept, purpose and functioning are the ones that are proposed for the WMF wiki Wikikids.

Promoters of Vikidia are willing to join the Wikimedia movement and have the Vikidia wiki adopted. Nevertheless, they expect that their project will keep its autonomy (in the same way that every Wikimedia project has its) and will not be altered by some restrictions to arise. They hope that their current wiki can help and inspire the features of the WMF Wikikids if it is to be launched.

Vikidia no longer requests to be adopted within this project (Explanation in english here) Astirmays (talk) 17:26, 5 January 2014 (UTC). If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page.[reply]

Vikidia in French was started in November 2006. It has a quite a lively and active community of users, it weighs today about 1 % of Wikipedia in French, in number of articles, activity and traffic : 36 550 articles on September 2022. Registration is not required. Its activity was quite steady since the beginning, with about 2200 articles a year. Its traffic has increased by more that 50% a year these last 3 years. It reach now about 500.000 unique visitors a month.
Vikidia in Spanish, started in May 2008, 4198 articles on May 2018. Registration is not required. Vikidia in spanish have had some well committed users, which explain its development. However, it didn't reach to a stable community and experience some inactivity periods. Surprisingly Vikidia in spanish, despite having no more real community, has shown the number of unique visitors jump from 25.327 to 80.417 unique visitors a month in one year, that is a 217,51 % progression... This wiki need to be promoted and relaunched, while taking advantage of the work already done.
Vikidia in Italian, started in December 2011, 6028 articles on May 2018. Registration is not required.
Vikidia in Russian, started in 2012. Registration is not required.
Vikidia in English was launched in February 2014, see Vikidia in English opens today, let’s build a children wiki encyclopedia!
Vikidia in Basque, started in 2015.
Vikidia in Greek was launched in May 2018

Le Dico des Ados (French)[edit]

Website logo

Le Dico des Ados (License: CC BY-SA 4.0) Le Dico des Ados is only in French (currently). It was created by a Swiss teacher. Its concept, purpose and functioning are similar to the ones that are proposed by the Wiktionary except that the articles are written by/for children. The data is entered via a form so no code is needed to participate.

Recently, it has received the support of Wikimedia CH.

Le Dico des Ados was started in October 2016. It has a quite a lively and active community of users (mostly pupils). Registration is advised but not required.

ZUM: Grundschulwiki (German)[edit]

ZUM is an association of German speaking teachers. The association wants to promote the use of wikis and, in general, Open Educational Resources.

ZUM-Grundschulwiki (License: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0): in German, started in December 2005, 1134 articles in November 2020: Registration required. Grundschulwiki is a learning platform for pupils of primary schools.

ZUM: Klexikon (German)[edit]

ZUM is an association of German speaking teachers. The association promotes the use of wikis and, in general, Open Educational Resources. It hosts several wikis, among them the Klexikon. The name stems from the German words Kinder and Lexikon, children and encyclopedia.

The Klexikon (license: CC BY-SA) started in November 2014. In April 2022, it had over 3300 content articles which all meet minimum quality standards. Klexikon concentrates on text quality and allows only registered users to edit. The editors are usually adults.

The wiki founders are happy to promote the Klexikon concept. A contact person on Meta-Wiki is User:Ziko.

Links:

the Klexikon page here on Meta-Wiki
English Wikipedia article and German Wikipedia article
Interview with Jimmy Wales about the Klexikon (video on YouTube, December 2020)

Michael and Ziko at Dortmund university with students, 2015
Conny reads Klexikon articles, Schriftgut fair in Dresden 2015
Promotional material (bookmark) supported by WMDE, 2017
Wikimania 2017 in Montréal
In a seminar in Essen, 2019
Klexion page views up to end of May 2019

German Wikipedia (WikiProject Medicine) Project 'Kinderleicht'[edit]

de:Portal:Medizin/Kinderleicht (License: CC-BY-SA): in German, started in June 2010, abandoned in August 2010, was a project within German Wikipedia. It produced 102 medical articles for children (some examples: Eye, Penis, Chickenpox)

The project has been abandoned after only two months due to a poll: 70,7 % of the voters did not want this project as a part of German Wikipedia. However a seperate project (detached from German Wikipedia) has been discussed several times.

The request Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Simple German 3 (which was meant as an project with articles entirely for kids) was rejected because "The policy does not allow for new "simple" projects".

kiwithek.kidsweb.at (German)[edit]

KiwiThek is a children's encyclopedia from Vienna, Austria inspired by Wikipedia.

mediawiki wiki hosted by non-profit "Wiener Bildungsserver - Verein zur Förderung von Medienaktivitäten im schulischen und außerschulischen Bereich"[1], since ~2011 [2]
content is not free, but under copyright KiwiThek:Impressum
stats: 1.103 articles and 36 registered user (January 2015) registration required, school class projects only
similarweb.com stats: 48.5% of total Kiwithek.kidsweb.at desktop traffic in last 3 months came from Germany (Austria 38.85%) (January 2015)

Wikimini (French, Swedish)[edit]

Wikimini-800x200-300dpi GIF white

fr.wikimini.org (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0): French, started on October 1, 2008, about 15500 articles in August 2015, registration required*
sv.wikimini.org (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0): Swedish, started on October 28, 2013, about 350 articles in August 2015, registration required*
lab.wikimini.org → New language versions are being developed (es, ar, ...) or desired (en, de, ...)

* Regarding contributions by unregistered editors: collecting and publishing the IP addresses of participating schools and children (without parental permission) has been considered a problem by the people who designed the project

Wikimini is an online encyclopedia where almost all of the content is being written by children and teenagers (~8 to 15 years old in the case of Wikimini). The target audience is 8-13 years. 10-15% of its articles are being created or developed in the context of class/school projects (see an original example covered by the press here (in French)), while the rest is being edited by other contributors outside any formal teaching context (see one of their young contributors interviewed at home by the national French TV). Adults are welcomed to participate and have a dedicated portal. Basically they can be seen as "helpers". They help with: organizing the content; following the recent changes; checking and proof-reading the articles; making text understandable when it is not; adding pictures and videos; providing encouragement and advices to new contributors; etc. (More details here (in French)). It should be noted that moderation and administration tasks are shared between both adults and children. Ultimately, the children remain the main actors and builders of the project and their contributions are not overwhelmed by massive adult inputs. This is a central scope of Wikimini and probably one of the most important factors regarding its success and the large-scale participation of children of all abilities (not only those excelling at school and with a high self-esteem).

The conceptual design of Wikimini began in Switzerland in 2008, within a small group of primary education teachers and students in educational sciences from the universities of Fribourg (CH) and Mons (BE). Actually, the initial aim was not to bring the project into reality, but only to imagine a successful way of building such a wiki. Laurent Jauquier, a Swiss teacher currently living in Brazil, and who was at the origin of the idea, took the lead and decided to transform it into reality. He launched Wikimini in French in October 2008.

The project has been growing fast ever since and has received a warm welcome from children, educational and media professionals around the French-speaking parts of the world. In 2011 it has even been awarded as the “Best French site / content for children” in a contest organized by the European Commission (more info here). More recently, Wikimini has received the financial support from Wikimedia CH to improve its technical infrastructure, develop a common repository of shared media files suitable for children (something like Commons), implement the technical requirements to support the development of other language versions and finally relieve the (non-technician) founder of the most highly technical workloads. Wikimedia SE joined the effort in 2013 and launched Wikimini in Swedish in collaboration with an educational institution from Sweden. See a report here.

It has been expressed on different occasions that Wikimini wants to collaborate/exchange with similar wikis and that motivated persons would be welcomed to coordinate and represent new versions of the project in their own language.

Wikimaxi[edit]

In the continuity of Wikimini, Wikimaxi is a project to create a similar encyclopedia, but targeting an older audience.

- Wikimini: 7-8 – 12-13 years (primary education)

- Wikimaxi: 12-13 – 17-18 years (secondary education)

The wikimaxi.org domain was registered for this purpose, but the project has not yet been taken forward.

Limited strictly at 2000 entries, and initially concerning the French wikijunior project, MillWothkiki has gradually targeted an older audience too. ONaNcle (talk) 08:20, 19 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Simple English Wikipedia (English)[edit]

Simple English Wikipedia is a language version of Wikipedia and can only one of its kind. After its creation, the WMF language committee decided that it does not recommend new Wikipedias in a language that already has a Wikipedia. Therefore, under the current guideline, it is not possible to create another 'simple Wikipedia' (in spite of several attempts).

Simple English Wikipedia tries to address these target groups: children, people with a different native language, and people with mental challenges (such as dyslexia).

The KidzSearch Wiki is a modified version of Simple English Wikipedia and can only by changed by approved staff to prevent vandalism. All imported content gets manually reviewed and edited to make sure it is family-friendly. Editors change articles when needed to make them more suited for children. New original articles are also created.

Previous discussion: w:simple:Wikipedia:Simple talk/Archive 96#WikiKids - Vikidia, December 2011

See : Wikikids/Relation to Simple English Wikipedia

Txikipedia, the basque version of Wikipedia for 8-13 year-old children[edit]

Txikipedia

Txikipedia is the first wiki encyclopedia for children within Wikipedia; there are other models, but not inside Wikipedia. It was born in April 2018 and had 2517 articles in November 2020. In the WP in Basque there is a new system of tabs, so that in the main page of the Basque WP we have the “Txikipedia” tab next to "Article" and "Talk", as well as an access in the menu bar, both of which lead to the main page of Txikipedia.

Txikipedia is an encyclopaedia for children, basically from the second cycle of primary education (8/13 years old). It develops contents of the school curriculum of that cycle of education, but also other topics of general interest and of interest to children in particular. It aims to use a simple and easy to understand language, with vocabulary and syntax according to the level of linguistic and intellectual development of the users and with relevant information content for this type of user.

Txikipedia is open to the collaboration of any person, including groups of students with the support and correction work of their teachers. To this end, the wiki invites the collaboration of primary and lower secondary school teachers and to integrate the active and passive use of the encyclopaedia into their teaching work.

Iniciatives like Txikipedia can become a very important tool for the recovery and normalization of minority languages among the younger population, because free access to knowledge in these languages is fundamental to strengthening their progressive normalization.

Related projects[edit]

Free projects that are not encyclopedias:

Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks)

Sections in language versions: Arabic, Bosnian, Catalan, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Malay, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Old English, Punjabi

Non-free/non-wiki online encyclopedias for children:

Britannica Kids (English)