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Printing Wikipedia
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."
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How much would it cost? Just the price to break even?
And if they make a profit, how will it be divided? How will they give it back to the community that wrote it?
I think it's best to keep the cost as low as possible, so break-even plus a tiny percentage. Where the tiny percentage (the profit) will be invested into the wiki directly.
I think you're after karma:p
Then again.. it doesn't make sense. Even the CD versions make less sense than the live database.
I mean.. if you cannot postback your comments and annotations, the why is it still called wikipedia ?!?
You're jokin'..
gtkaml.org
I think that something that Wikipedia needs more urgently are -stable and -current version of the data. Have a working copy that anyone can edit, yes, and then on a completly seperate domain name, have the articles copied, checked for accuracy, cleaned up etc. and locked down. Thus, once an article reaches maturity, it's static so it's much easier to refer to it from websites and other citations, the quality is more reliable, it's kid-safe so schools etc. can use it as a reference, the accuracy can be checked and wikipedia doesn't keep it's reputation among academics which is usually expressed in terms of monkeys and typewriters.
And if they do use a stable version for printing, then the could offer that as a version for those that don't want beta entries. Entries with less than a certain viewer/edit ratio would be deemed "beta" and not show to people or coded as such.
Wiki could even color-code the text by recency of edit. Readers would know which sections are too recent to trust and editor would see what's changed.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
No, these people were generally fed by the town that they came to, in return for telling a story, news, or a song.
I remember a few weeks ago when Pegging appeared in the 'Did you know...' section on the front page (with a description!).
I wonder if this and others will make it into the print version?! Here's a few others that will help to educate the children
Tea bagging
Scissor sisters
Soggie biscuit
Nothing costs nothing
The part about featured articles not suffering from Wikipedia's "disadvantages" is bullshit. They suffer, just as well. The amount of imprecision, wrong formulations and sheer sloppyness in Quantum mechanics, just to cite one example, should disprove your point.
There is absolutely nothing inherent in the featured articles to make them any better at whitstanding anonymous vandalism.
Sigged!
If I were going to take on a project of this magnitude, I would freeze a snapshot of the current Wikipedia so that the version we were editing was not constantly changing, and then I would get some people (either paid or volunteer) to go through and do some fact checking and editing. Sure, that would be costly and time-consuming, but with all the critics WikiPedia has amassed, they really can't afford for something like this to be a half-baked disaster. It's a bad idea to publish print copies of these articles if they haven't been subjected to some kind of critical eye aside from the general internet public.
Also, a disclaimer might be necessesary. People should be fully aware of what Wikipedia is, and where the information came from.
I think this is a great project, and that there's great value in it. Wikipedia is an awesome source of information. However, just like any other single source of information, it cannot be taken as the final authority on any topic. Most of us in the internet community already know this. Still, you cannot completely disregard what a magnificent thing it is to have such a massive collection of information, even if some of it is more like conventional wisdom than pure fact.
That said,
It's pretty clear from TFA that they are just now "talking to several agents and publishers about what they would be interested in", to quote Wales. They clearly don't plan to print out the whole damn thing and drop it from helicopters. They're just talking about making some articles available, such as ones on public health concerns as opposed to say, the history of the Marvel Universe. And they're mostly talking about CDs for libraries with computers, since telecomm infrastructure is unavailable to millions there even with the delivery of something as wonderful as a $100 terminal.
It's a community project that provides a unique and interesting source of information -- its not a reliable single resource tool. Who is it that you all think would clean up and "verify" all this information? The whole point of the thing is an experiment to see how a community manages its information as a collective, and a limited print or CD project for the third world fits in with this innovative mission. Somewhere along the line people started yakking about how lazy researchers might mistake it for an authoritative, edited resource and that this makes the _Wikipedia Project_ the bad guy.
Next thing you know they'll be believing something just because the President said it. Who's fault is that?
RTFA. RTFA. RTFA.
I bet you're thinking "duh, they already do", but I don't think it really follows the open source model of development from my experience.
In the open source model of development you have several levels of "contributers". (I probably missed a level or two)
1. Maintainer
2. Commiters
3. Submitters
4. Users
These levels represent levels of trust, with the Maintainer the most trust worthy, and the Users being the least. Anything contributed by those with lower trust levels gets reviewed by the higher trust levels, and appropriate action is taken (either the change is accepted or rejected). If you do something to ruin that trust, you are forced down the levels by your peers.
The only problem with this scheme in wikipedia is there will be more forking and competing articles. However, this can be mitigated in a similar fashion to what wikipedia is doing now with links at the top of articles linking to competing pages.
If anyone is interested in setting up this kind of encyclopedia, or knows of one already in use out there, send me a link.
And after they finish printing it, it will be completely outdated...
China isn't the third world. What gave you that idea? The world classifications come more from political alignment in the cold-war. In that respect, China is very much "Second World", but they hold an large amount of economic power.
Giving out first-world encyclopedia can be culturally harmful to third-world countries. It would be very interesting, if they did have access, to see what information they would add or whether they would even be interested in adding anything.
One of my problems with "notability" is that it's really very much in the eye of the beholder. If someone says "that's not notable", it can simply mean that they don't know very much about the topic, and maybe there are some obscure 13th century specialist academics who think it is very much notable.
A lot of the gray-area votes are arbitrary.I wouldn't say double standards, it's just different editors have different standards because there's no single policy that specifies what's notable and what's not.
Well, there are some procedural things about wikipedia that unnerves me. I would like to see a competing project give a serious go at an alternative structure, to see if things can be done better.
A lot of the information ISN'T out there. I took a college courses on African American music and African American art. To my suprise, a great number of the most highlighted artists in the class had no information available to them on the internet. I started the Wikiprojects on Composers and Visual Arts after that and we've discovered a large number of composers aren't only neglected on Wikipedia, but on the internet. It's especially sad considering a good book on the subject would have at least a little of the information. The textbook I have on African American music isn't even that big, but even a few sentences on a few of the people mentioned is more than I can find in the whole internet. The internet hasn't caught up with print yet outside of the most popular topics.
[ Sketchee ]
They don't look at everything they see with an objective eye.
;)
Of course not. Objectivity is officially nonexistent on Wikipedia.