| The Canadawiki project currently has 14,793 articles, starting with social studies material (primarily the CanLine Canadian Chronology and Canaday - Today in Canadian History), as well as Canadian stories and biographies (starting with Alberta and Saskatchewan biographies, to celebrate the centennials), and the CanQuotes Canadian Quotations collection, Canada's largest. |
| Canadawiki is using some basic History of Canada Online, Canadian History News and Wikipedia articles to help seed the portal, but we are gradually replacing these and developing unique Canadawiki content, starting with timelines and biographies. |
| Canadawiki is a controlled portal. If you want to create or edit content, we provide a User IDs and password on request. In this way, we can prevent submission vandalism, vanity publishing and graffiti. Teachers can also manage class efforts if they want their students to contribute and share deeper, local content. |
| We also reserve the right to lock some Canadawiki pages to prevent over-editing and overcomplication, and to refuse content if the quality and utility are questionable. In terms of providing narrative articles, we currently rely on links to sites such as our History of Canada Online, Canada's First People and Civics Canada Online textbook portals, with permission from the copyright holders. |
| Canadawiki is NOT an online encyclopedia. In general, we prefer lists and point form content to long narrative articles. We ask for submissions in raw and plain form that students can use for research and to assemble their own work. We don't want to spoon feed conclusions and points of view (NO-POV). As with any public wiki, we do not guarantee this information source to be accurate. |
| In the case of biographies, say, John A. Macdonald, we believe students can go far beyond cribbing a narrative encyclopedic biography, and produce their own content by reworking their own timelines and images. |
| As the great educator Piaget wrote,
"Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely." |
| We believe that is the case for any form of learning. So above all, Canadawiki is a way for Canadians to understand Canada. |
| Alastair Sweeny,
Executive Producer |
(e-mail)
