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."

Comments

Re:This makes sense.

[b100dian]

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'..

A better idea...

[ledow]

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.

Re:A better idea...

[David Gerard]

The least-worst idea I've seen is a massively distributed article rating system — an editorial committee can't possibly scale (we've currently got about two Britannicas of text), but lots of people clicking "Rate this page" has a chance. Particularly as our readers currently outnumber our editors 50:1 or so.

See Article validation feature and En validation topics - which would put a "Rate this page" tab at the top of every page. The feature is currently waiting on a version of the code that won't overload the database if it's put into production ;-)

See also my plan for 1.0 (I dashed this off about a year ago and it's still the best working plan we have) and Category:Wikipedia 1.0 (a bunch of writings on producing a stable version).

I assume they will use an "old" version

[G4from128k]

If this project is to avoid erroneous and vandal edits, it needs to use a well-reviewed version of each entry. Only entries that have been seen X times in the last Y days with no edits would be printable.

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.

Wikipedia should move toward the open source model

[balls199]

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.