Do you now the free encyclopaedia of scouting ?

[Florian]

Hello, my name is Florian and I am a French scoutleader (of a small troop of 25 boys).

I would like to deal with ScoutWiki Network, the free encyclopaedia of scouting. Do you know it ? Some years ago, in several countries in the world, scoutleaders had the same idea : making a free encyclopaedia on scouting based on the system of the free encyclopaedia Wikipaedia. There were scout wikis in Finnish, French, Dutch, German, Spannish. And one day, a French administrator of the French scout wiki (a friend of mine) found the other wikis on the Web and we decided to make a network with all the encyclopaedias. So now in scoutwiki network we have 12 encyclopaedias in Finnish, French, Dutch, English, Spannish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, Arab and Esperanto (the four last ones of the list are not very active) : http://www.scoutwiki.org/ and we can create interwiki links.

 

The ScoutWiki in English was founded by a BSA but there were not many articles, now it is hosted on the ScoutWiki Network's server and we imported a lot of pages from wikipaedia. But the huge problem is that there is not a lot of native English-speaking users (5 or 6), so if you want to help us and use this encyclopaedia, let's go. ScoutWiki has become a reference site in the French scout Web and I think the English ScoutWiki can be a way to share all we know about scouting. Here is the site : http://en.scoutwiki.org/Main_Page, if you want some help or ask something, you can write here or on the administrators' talk pages.

 

Friendly

 

Florian

 

PS 1 : I quickly ran one's eye over this interesting forum and I realized there was a lot of American users, is there scouts from other countries here ?

PS 2 : Please excuse me from my English.

[Ohio_Scouter]

Bonjour, Florian, and welcome!

 

I will look into scoutwiki.org as soon as possible.

 

I believe the majority of users on this site are American, but I know that there are several Scouters here from Australia, also.

 

There is no need to excuse your English; your English is much better than my French .

[scoutldr]

Bienvenue, Florian! Yes, most of us are American, but we have some Australians, a German, and a transplanted Englishman among us. It's always good to hear about Scouting in other countries. Hopefully you will stay awhile and join us around our virtual campfire.

 

 

[Florian]

Thank you, guys !

I just realize I made a big typing error in the title of the topic, if an admin could correct it, please.

 

In fact in France, the situation of scouting is very, very particular. We don't have a single NSO for example but 9 recognized by French State, 5 are members of a federation recognized by WOSM/WAGGGS and 4 none. We are 80 000 scouts members of the WOSM/WAGGGS and 50 000 non-members. So we are not many (for example Belgium is 6 times smaller than France for population and there are 150 000 scouts in the country). Scouting is so divided because of the religion (the 5 NSO of WOSM/WAGGGS are Roman Catholic (the mine), Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religion) and pedagogical differences : the recognized organizations changed their method during the sixties and imposed the new method to all the groups so some of them separate to found a new organization . For long time, it have been very difficult to discuss between us, but this year with the scouting's centenary, we succeeded to pass beyond our differences and I hope we will succeed to become united.

 

So here is the situation in France, as you can see, it's very very special

 

PS : I still advertise ScoutWiki , we have a forum too even we prefer use the Talk pages on the wikis : http://forum.scoutwiki.org/

[Florian]

Wow it's near 4:00 AM in USA ! But for me it's 11:00 AM ! So good night !