Communauté  • Livre d'or
Chats noirs.jpg Actualités, astuces, interview... Venez lire la gazette de ce printemps de Vikidia ! DessinInterview.png

Utilisateur:S.Perquin/Histoire de Vikidia

Aller à la navigation Aller à la recherche
Vous souhaitez contribuer à cette historiographie ?
Si vous souhaitez apporter des ajouts ou des corrections aux informations existantes, veuillez envoyer un message à l'utilisateur S.Perquin via sa page de discussion. Veuillez ne pas modifier vous-même le contenu de cette page.


This page attempts to give as complete a description as possible of the history of Vikidia. How did Vikidia come into being? Who were the first contributors? Which users made major contributions to the construction of Vikidia? What (major) events have all taken place? How has Vikidia changed over all these years? What was the community like before? How did Vikidia become what it is today? You can read all about it on this page.

Early development[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

Mathias Damour

It all started when French users of Wikipedia had a discussion regarding Wikipédia Junior, a project that fulfilled a proposed idea previously under the name Wikikids. The Wikipedia Junior project first became the idea of an encyclopedia dedicated to children and 12-plusers, based on French Wikipedia articles. It would contain about 2,000 articles, which could be uploaded in a first run, and then written on a CD-ROM. Wikipedia articles have been checked and slightly modified for it.

A single final check of the article for inappropriate content for children quickly proved insufficient to meet the need for appropriate content for the age group. However, a further work to create a special version of each article would have been difficult on Wikipedia itself. More it seemed interesting that the opportunity to edit the encyclopedia was offered to the children, for those who would read it. It seemed interesting that children could edit articles, either individually or as part of educational projects. For this reason, a separate wiki had to be created. Two different realizations were distinguished:

  1. Select improve and list articles from Wikipedia on a CD-ROM, used for educational purposes;
  2. An independent wiki for children, with new editing of each article and the possibility for children to participate.

This idea was previously proposed on meta.wikimedia, called Wikikids, in early 2005, mainly by German Wikipedians.

2006: Launch[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

They did not seem to be done for a while. Mathias Damour, a user associated with this project who contributes under the name Astirmays, and the Wikimedia Foundation differed on which texts the children should create and edit themselves. The two sides could not reach an agreement on this discussion. Based on his own autonomous decision, on November 14, 2006, Damour created Vikidia independently of the Wikimedia Foundation. The wiki opened on November 17, 2006. After some technical problems, the site was launched on that date by several Wikipedians who had participated or just keept eyeing this project before. The first article created was Licence de documentation libre GNU (GNU Free Documentation License), followed by Chien (dog).

WikiKids[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

The WikiKids logo

Vikidia is also inspired by the one-month older wiki: WikiKids, a Dutch internet encyclopedia and for ages 8 to 12. That other project was launched by elementary school teachers (with Gerard Dümmer as creator and founder) and is primarily intended for use within a school. However, it is still open to spontaneously enrolled editors not from an identified school. WikiKids is supported by Kennisnet, a Dutch public Internet organization dedicated to education.

2007 – 2021[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

Mathias Damour speaking about Vikidia at Rencontres Wikimedia 2012

It reached the threshold of a thousand articles in April 2007, with around a hundred registered contributors. On December 19, 2007, the milestone of 3,000 articles was passed, and on September 21, 2008, the milestone of 5,000 articles was reached. On January 19 and 20, 2008, Grondin updated the Mediawiki software that runs Vikidia, moving from version 1.8.2 to version 1.12. In October 2010, the site had 8,000 articles. On July 6, 2011, 10,000 articles.

Diffusion to other language versions[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

In May 2008, Vikidia launched a Spanish version. This year also sees the publication of a book that mentions Vikidia for the first time. On April 9, 2011, the Vikidia Association was founded and became the owner of the encyclopedia.

Several versions of Vikidia were launched progressively between 2012 and 2021 following discussions by the association and, in some cases, at the request of users. This also marks the appearance of a new status, that of global administrator.

  • In March 2012, Vikidia saw the creation of an Italian version, and the Russian version appeared in November of the same year.
  • On February 27, 2014, Vikidia launched an English version.
  • On February 3, 2015, Vikidia launched a Catalan version, and in June, the Basque and Sicilian versions were launched.
  • Since 2014, there had been talk of opening the German version of Vikidia, which will be the case after 3 years of discussion, in August 2017.
  • In May 2018, the Greek version is launched.
  • On February 21, 2021, Vikidia sees the creation of a Portuguese version and an Occitan version in December of the same year.

2022 – present[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

In October 2022, the Vikidia Association has applied to the French government's Citizen Initiative Accelerator program, and had been selected. Vikidia received €80,000 in grants from the Accelerator program. Vikidia continues the accelerator of citizen initiatives. Vidia moved into the second phase of the program, and hoped to receive a further €60,000 by the end of 2022.

Today, there are 41 563 articles on the French Vikidia.

Sources[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

See also[modifier | modifier le wikicode]

Récupérée de « http://fr.vikidia.org/w/index.php?title=Utilisateur:S.Perquin/Histoire_de_Vikidia&oldid=2060182 »