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Wikipedia Planning a DVD Version
daria42 writes "The Wikipedia Foundation hopes to sell an English version of Wikipedia on CD-ROM and DVD before the end of the year. A boxed set of the German language version of Wikipedia has been available since last year. An updated version of the German Wikipedia was launched on Amazon.de this week, and the e-commerce site has received 8,000 pre-orders, according to Wikipedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales. Wales said it was easier to put the German version of Wikipedia onto CD as there are significantly less pages than there are for the English language version. He said that English Wikipedia would 'barely fit on 2 DVDs.'"
Have a read.
Text content contributed to Wikipedia must be GFDL, so the foundation can sell it as long as they respect the authors' copyright and the terms of the license. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is not-for-profit, even commercial distribution would have been acceptable under the terms of the GFDL. But the content copyrights still belong to those who created it.
On the other hand, it happens that people contribute material copyrighted by other people, without their consent. According to U.S. law, Wikipedia cannot be held responsible for that, as long as they act quickly to remove infringing material. When physical media is distributed, that protection is no longer valid.
I first heard about this back in July of 2004. The people at Mandrake had already approached some of our people, and told us they wanted to put Wikipedia on DVD. The stumbling block was, of course, copyright issues. We launched a copyright tagging project in August - basically, they did an sql dump of the list of all uploaded files that had no copyright tag and tagged them. In January, Angela sent them an email, telling them it was done, and that's when the DVD project actually started.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You could if you studied it for a minute. The rules are actually relatively simples. For example, let's look at everyone's favorite word: "Aktiengesellschaft", meaning a public corporation, and usually abbreviated "AG".
Semantically, it can be broken into Aktien / Gesell / -schaft; taken at this decomposed level it means something a little bit like "stock fellowship".
Orthographically, well, you're in luck; as usual (always?), it breaks down along the same lines, according to the rules. What are the rules? I couldn't tell you exactly, but they're simple, and they're similar to Latin's. Anyway, it breaks down to Ak/tien/ge/sell/schaft. Breaks occur between consonants that don't form clusters, between vowels that don't form diphthongs, and otherwise before consonants.