维基百科，英文名为Wikipedia，自由的百科全书。它是一种基于Wiki的百科全书，是一个自由、免费、内容开放的百科全书协作计划，参与者来自世界各地,目前已经成长为全球最大的网络百科全书，百度百科的创作模式的原型也是维基。维基百科全书是一部用不同语言写成的百科全书。该计划自2001年1月15日开始上线，截至2006年1月，英文版维基百科已有1,000,000多个条目，中文维基百科也有超过150,000多个条目。而所有212种语言的版本共有大约250万个条目。大部分网页都可以由任何人使用浏览器进行修改。维基百科的普及也促成了其它计划，例如维基新闻、维基教科书等计划的产生，但是也造成对这些所有人都可以编辑的内容的准确性的争议。
维基百科与SOS Children's Village(世界上最大的孤儿慈善基金会)合作发布的维基精选（校园版）主要是面向儿童的一个版本，其中包括艺术、商业、公民、国家、设计和技术、日常生活、图片、历史、IT、语言和文化、数学、音乐、人物、宗教、科学等15类的相关资源。这个版本有缩略版（792M）和完全版（2.5G），不同的地方只是缩略版的图是小图，完全版的是大图，但文字内容是一样的。去年有位前辈发布了2006版，这个是今年5月29日发布的新版。另：我还有发布了维基精选版0.5，这个版本是官方发布的面向大众的维基百科的精选文章。两者都是官方发布的，区别只是面向对象不同。如果你喜欢wikipedia，喜欢知识的共享，可以关注一下我发布的资源。
Welcome to this Wikipedia Selection. This 2007 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It is about the size of a fifteen volume encyclopaedia (24,000 images and 14 million words), and includes essentially all topics in Wikipedia rated "Good" or higher by Wikipedia itself at date of production. Volunteers at Wikipedia have also suggested more than a thousand other articles considered valuable and relevant to this project which SOS Children volunteers have checked="checked"and tidied up.
Wikipedia is the free encyclopaedia anyone can edit, and an independent study published by Nature found it very accurate, but Wikipedia is not a childsafe environment (you can meet anonymous adults there), has "adult" content, and suffers from graffiti and vandalism, which limits usefulness. This selection of topics have been carefully chosen, tidied up, and checked="checked"for vandalism and suitability (by SOS Children volunteers, whom we gratefully acknowledge). Around fifty items of graffiti were found and removed from this selection of articles. We also gratefully acknowledge the Wikimedia Foundation for their support and their agreement to our use of the Wikipedia logo, and tens of thousands of contributors to Wikipedia who have written and researched the content in the first place.
Topics were chosen for interest to children, by relevance to the National Curriculum and including much of the very best of Wikipedia. The selection is vast, and covers core subjects but does not try to be uniformly detailed: for example it has more depth on Llandudno, which is featured in the curriculum, than other similar places.
The content can be navigated using a pictorial subject index, or a title word index of all topics. The subject index is to help you find relevant articles, not define them, so it deliberately includes topics which people may search for under the subject (for example, we know Pluto is no longer officially a planet but include it in the planets anyway because people may look for it there. Equally countries are put in both Asia and Europe if we think people may look for them in either.) The title word index includes alternate article titles (so the article on Pyrite turns up under Fool's Gold etc.) including mispellings.
The content comes in two forms: with just thumbnail images for free download from the SOS Children website or as a 3.5GB free DVD with larger image pictures. Both forms include a shortened copy of the SOS Children website with details of projects in 123 countries. This selection is also browsable online at http://schools-wikipedia.org/ . The content is covered by various disclaimers and licences.
You can use the indexes to find your way around but the best way is perhaps to pick an article and follow the links to other topics embedded in the text: for example, good starting places are Africa, The Solar System, Tsunami or Apple.
This selection is a part of a larger collection at Wikipedia, which we commend especially for older children. We have tried to tidy up all links to material not included (such as images where we perceived a copyright problem) but occasional "dead-ends" may remain, particularly in "part of a series" content boxes. Please let us know of any other faults, at the present time apart from a deliberate "Easter Egg", all known faults have been fixed. If you find pieces of foreign text appear as "?????" or similar, however, this is likely to be because you don't have an font installed for that language: please check the same article on Wikipedia itself before you complain. Also early versions of Internet Explorer give big gaps on some pages: again, check with a top tier free browser like Firefox before letting us know.
Please note that Wikipedia's policies are that content has to be verifiable and based on recognised reliable sources. We have not included references and sources in this selection, but you can check them at Wikipedia online if you have any questions.
Download
You can download a copy of this web site, see: "SOS Children launches Wikipedia for Schools".
