Wikijunior:Dinosaurs/About

This book is part of Wikibooks and the "Wikijunior" subsection aimed at children. Wikibooks is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, aimed at providing free, easily available quality reading for both children and adults to promote the global spread of knowledge. Traditional publishing houses make the bulk of their income from re-issues of classic books, new books by authors with long track records, or celebrities who are famous in their own right. Within Wikibooks, the research is new, the facts gathered by thousands of tireless volunteers who work without pay, without compensation, and without the urging of others. The works you see here are a labor of love on the part of the contributors and their only wish is that their knowledge be shared with the world freely.

With this project we have reached a crossroad between the books of yesterday, and the encyclopedia of everything for tomorrow. Simply by reading this book and telling your friends, you have advanced the cause of free access to information and of democratizing the field of publishing. Thank you for the opportunity; in return, our gift to you is to learn the tale of the greatest creatures that ever lived. Everyone who contributed to this book hopes that you find adventure in this book, adventure and knowledge.

Contributing

Please, if you can contribute to this book, do so. Many sections are in need of cleanup and complete rewrites.

When working on this project, remember that it's aimed at children. It's more important to be understood than to be precisely accurate on every detail. Use technical vocabulary when you need to, but don't use big words where simpler language would work. Whenever you have to use a word, list it in the glossary of basic terms, and define it. Either that, or note it needs to be defined in the glossary page. Giving definitions when such words are used is generally a good idea as well.

If you have made contributions to this Wikibook and would like to have formal credit for being an author, please add your name to the list Authors page

Tracking progress

On the main page we are using the following small icons alongside page titles, to indicate the progress with developing the content:

Templates

We have a navigation template: {{WJ Dinosaurs}} to appear on each page

We have also followed a standard structure for each of the dinosaur pages, answering this set of questions:

• What did they look like? (Their size, how they walked, some interesting facts about their different parts, etc.)
• What did they eat? (Plant-eaters, omnivorous, or carnivorous, or more?)
• When did they live? (Not all species of dinosaurs were alive during the K-T event. There were several development periods for different dinosaur species and some were likely "ancestors" of other dinosaurs found in later periods.)
• Where did they live? (Ocean, shallow seas, jungle, grasslands, etc.)
• How were they discovered? (Discussions about where the fossils were found and perhaps even names and information about the discoverer.)
• What do we need to learn? (To demonstrate that science is still evolving and that we don't know all of the answers.)