Utilisatrice:Anthere/Penn grant
Adress
E-mail: xxx
Inquiry letter by The Wikimedia Foundation
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home )
submitted to xxx
The goal of our project is to help gather and organise information on ecozones and ecoregions for the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, and then to support its distribution.
My name is xxx. I am a French agronomist engineer, currently employed to develop decision-tool software for sustainable agriculture. I am vice-chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I am also a voluntary editor of Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation (http://www.wikimediafoundation.org ) is dedicated to the collection and distribution of human knowledge in multiple languages. Our goal is to gather knowledge, and make it available to as many people as possible. To achieve this, we provide our content free of charge, under a free license (GFDL), and in as many languages as we can (50 languages are currently in active development).
We have many outstanding projects, including the online encyclopaedia at http://www.wikipedia.org, with over 1 million articles as of september 2004, and many affiliated projects, including dictionaries, textbooks and collections of quotations. After less than four years, our projects are growing beyond our wildest expectations. We have some 50,000 contributors worldwide from all walks of life, ranging from high school students to retirees, and with a number of teenagers heavily involved.
Our philosophy is that while no one can know everything, everyone knows something and can become a teacher and share knowledge with others. Accordingly, one of the things that distinguishes us from other information projects is that anyone can be a contributor.
The sum of our individual contributions has made the project what it is today, it is among the top 400 websites in the world, and is frequently quoted by traditional media, including the New York Times and the BBC. We also recently won the highest award for Digital Communities in the Prix Ars Electronica, at a ceremony sponsored by the United Nations.
We have much to be proud of, considering that our project is entirely volunteer-based. Almost all of our financial support is flow is from small donations from dedicated users and fans. However, we have reached the stage where we need outside assistance to continue to grow. For example, the site currently receives over 20 million hits a day, and this is growing rapidly. For us to keep up with this growth, we must continually purchase new servers and upgrade the existing ones. We would also like to expand some of our specialised projects, including some underdeveloped parts of our encyclopaedia.
Here is one example: in the French-language and English-language encyclopaedias, there is an ongoing project, called the Ecoregion project in English (and the Ecoatlas in French):
I invite you to look at a few of these links
- link to one biome : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove
- link to one ecozone : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearctic
- link to an ecoregion listing : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3AEcoregions
This project is directly inspired by the World Wildlife Federation website that National Geographic has actively supported. However it is also different, as it does not aim at being as specialised in conservation as the WWF site, while it definitly aims to interconnect all geographic, ecological, political, sociological and other relevant information included in the encyclopaedia. We believe it is essential to make people aware that geography is not only about sets of political boundaries, but also a collection of entities which may be identified by their soil, climate, vegetation, and geological characteristics, interconnected to each other, and more or less impacted by human activity. Thinking in terms of "ecoregions" is another way to see the world, a new perspective to show us how we can act to protect it as good stewards.
Consequently, the ecoregion project aims at identifying all ecoregions, in describing them all (subsequently requiring full description of soils, climate, biomes etc..), and providing for each any information which may help to understand their current state (for example, type of agriculture, local conflicts, deforestation, development policies, etc...). It is also related to the biggest and most multilingual "subproject" : the Tree of Life, as well as to Wikispecies (http://www.wikispecies.org ), a collection of biological information about living things, which aims at becoming an open, free directory of species for use by scientists and students everywhere. This will cover animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life to the extent that our users can write about them and contribute.
This huge project is progressing steadily. For example, the English version has already done a lot in the way of ecozone description (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearctic ), and has amazing content regarding birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird ), whereas the French version has mostly been working towards gathering of plant information per ecozone (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantes_par_nom_scientifique ). We have also already gathered many images, in particular for areas with striking landscape, plants, and animals.
Of course, we are looking for more participation from knowledgeable specialists, and it is our belief that the full success of this project will require awareness and help from academics from over the world, as well as from some environmental organisations.
Participation by many teenagers is also hoped for, as all what one needs to participate in our project is a computer, an internet connexion and a strong desire to interact with others, to learn and to teach.
We recently began printing small booklets with content from the encyclopaedia, about 200 pages on a specific topic, which we called wikireaders. Two have been printed in german and one in english (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AWikiReader ). These experimental wikireaders were sold for a minimal price, covering publication and distribution costs. We would also like to study the possibility of making these printed texts available for schools or public librairies in many countries, including underdeveloped ones.
We have a dream that once enough information has been gathered on ecoregions, some wikireaders will be published on these topics and made available in high schools and libraries, for free or for a nominal amount. One can imagine a wikireader about one ecoregion could contain all relevant information about this ecoregion : ecozone, climate type, soil type, geological pecularities, water bodies, biotope and biocenosis, conservation status, major indigenous species, human history, national states covered by the ecoregion, major ecological and political events and threats.
Such a project could be interesting for teenagers all over the world, either as a different perspective from what they get in school, or just as an introduction for those who do not have much opportunity to attend school. Current articles are rather suited for teenagers and adults, but simplified versions including more juvenile material might also be considered.
This project might be seen from several perspectives.
First, its success will depend on the collaboration of people from all around the world, and with Wikipedia we can now say definitly that "wide-spread collaboration works".
Second, it will be a unique way to gather and link information and to promote understanding of geography, geology and ecology in all its diversity, as well as understanding the dynamics of human interaction with the environment.
Third, it will be successful if teachers and students can both participate in this project as editors, and become agents in building this information resource, rather than just passive learners.
Finally, each article of the project will be an additional brick in a foundation promotings the conservation of both cultural and natural resources and helpings people become better stewards of our global heritage.
I am writing to inquire whether we might be eligible for a grant to support this endeavour? I look forward to your consideration of this inquiry and would be pleased to submit additional information or a formal proposal at your request. I am available to answer any additional questions and I invite you to explore this and other projects on http://www.wikipedia.org.
Sincerely,
First name, Last name
Vice-chair, The Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.org
Home address: