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).