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Printing Wikipedia

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the where-have-i-heard-that-idea-before dept.

rtnair writes "Entries from Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users, may soon be available in print for readers in the developing world, founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday."

7 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Which third world? by tgv · · Score: 2, Informative

    Which third world would that precisely be? The one where they can read English and have enough money to buy an encyclopedia with mainly useless entries (Startrek anyone)? Does this third world happen to be located between Canada and Mexico?

  2. Re:Printed?! by somersault · · Score: 2, Informative

    er... when it says available in print, it means ready printed. Like a magazine. Surely if they had a computer they could already print out a wikipedia article. Do you see the irony?

    --
    which is totally what she said
  3. Re:What's the point again? by interiot · · Score: 4, Informative
    Wikipedia audiobooks are being made available, and are also static. The goal is to make Wikipedia content available in other forms when those media will be more convenient (eg. when offline, when in your car).

    Also, only a subset of wikipedia will be available offline. Wikipedia's featured articles for the most part don't suffer from Wikipedia's usual disadvantages as they are more thoroughly reviewed than most articles.

  4. Re:A better idea... by interiot · · Score: 2, Informative
    Wikipedia has stated that no article will be locked down for reasons of maturity. Wikipedia is considering causing edits to be delayed, so that vandalism has a chance to be checked and removed before it's visible to everyone, but articles on Wikipedia will never be considered to be "finished".

    People who really need to refer to a solidifed version of a page can include the time of access in the reference (just as you'd do when using any webpage as a proper reference), or using a URL that points to a specific historic version (example).

  5. Re:True, but not a big deal by interiot · · Score: 4, Informative

    That was the RC patrol at work there (RC = recent changes). There is some percentage of vandalism that stays around for a while though, so yes, it's doubly important to triple check facts. (for instance, somebody completely made up a soccer player, and the page ended up sticking around for several months before someone did a little more googling than normal, and found out that the player clearly didn't exist).

  6. Re:Cost and earnings by Eightyford · · Score: 2, Informative

    If someone decides to sell it a a profit, then you are free to sell your own version for free. Same as linux as far as I know.

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  7. Re:True, but not a big deal by interiot · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is rediculous because, as you state, a non-existant soccer player gets ZERO questions

    Actually, the non-existant soccer player got unanimously deleted as soon as it was discovered. I simply saved a copy because it was one of the more unique examples of vandalism I'd seen (most are almost exactly the same).

    VfD's can be stressful, especially for new editors. It's hard to not take it as a personal afront.

    What's the BBS, by the way?

    Yes, there are a lot of gray areas in terms of what should be included in Wikipedia. Notability is especially contentious.

    Then you have to also note the number of other articles that are totally pointless in terms of cultural relevance to anything - less than the BBS in question was.
    Well, the most extreme examples don't count. AfD/VfD is sometimes a bit of a random process, and you never know if something will be kept or not. So sometimes things aren't deleted, or aren't deleted right away, or, better yet, aren't merged yet, and current editors often disagree with previous precedent.
    Wikipedia is the perfect example of pitifully poor organizational structure marred by populist tendencies and groupthink.

    Wikipedia is also different from things like Slashdot and such because the goal is to have one big, cohesive database of human knowledge. On Slashdot, comments are only read for a couple days. On Wikipedia, I might think something should be phrased a certain way, but someone else might think it would be better phrased another way, and we have to actually settle those disagreements.

    The fact that everyone has to cooperate on Wikipedia a lot more means that things won't always go my way. And that's not something that will ever change.