Free children's encyclopedia & online reference for schools

Welcome to Children's Free Encyclopedia selection and online reference for schools. The word "encyclopaedia" comes from the Classical Greek, transliterated "enkyklios paideia"; "enkyklios" meaning "cyclical, periodic, or ordinary", and "paideia" meaning "education". Together, the phrase literally translates as a "well-rounded education", meaning "general knowledge". This encyclopedia is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, useful for the English speaking world. It has more than 5500 articles and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopedia (34,000 images and 20 million words). Articles were ranked by importance and quality and manually sorted for relevance to children, after removing the adult topics. SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections.

Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, and develops accurate content but suffers great deal of vandalism. Wikipedia is not necessarily a childsafe environment, has "adult" content. This selection of topics have been carefully chosen, tidied up, and checked for vandalism and suitability (by SOS Children volunteers). The Wikimedia Foundation is gratefully acknowledged for their tens of thousands of contributors who have written and researched the content in the first place, adding content where gaps in the school curriculum were not covered.

Topics were chosen for interest to children, by relevance to the school curriculum and including the very best of Wikipedia. The selection is vast, and covers core subjects.

The content can be navigated using a pictorial subject index, or a title word index of all topics. The subject index is to help find relevant articles, it deliberately includes topics which people may search for under the subject. For example Pluto is still listed in the category of planets even though it is not considered a planet any more because people may look for it there. Equally countries are put in both Asia and Europe if 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.).

This Selection includes thirty "Portal Pages", which give a brief overview of a topic and list some key articles within it. For example: Portal for Ancient Greece, Portal for Physics, Portal for Medicine, the Weather Portal or the India Portal. 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 Taj Mahal, Leo Tolstoy, The Solar System, Tyrannosaurus, Cuba, Salsa Music or Dance.

This selection is recommended for children age 8 to 17. A larger collection at Wikipedia, is commended for older children. If you find pieces of foreign text appear as "?????" or similar, however, this is likely to be because you don't have a font installed for that language.

Please note that in accordance to Wikipedia's policies all the content is verifiable and based on recognised reliable sources. The content is covered by various disclaimers and licences.

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