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

Mis-information?

[phase_9]

Great, so now people in developing countries will learn the truth... or just read lots of entires which have been "vandalized" with the word "boobies!"

Re:Mis-information?

[PornMaster]

Haven't you ever read National Geographic? They already have boobies there!

Another problem solved

[LaughingCoder]

So now we have someplace to send all of those out of work encyclopedia salesmen! They can hawk wikipedia in the third world! I can see them trapsing about, lugging a satchel full of CDs. "You don't want to deprive your children from having access to these wonderful volumes!"

Problems

[springbox]

I like Wikipedia, but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times. It certainly has some errors (like the "prant" statement for the Mathematica hello world program), but if you present this in book form to a thrid world country, which I'm assuming doesn't have internet access because of this, then it would be way too easy for people to take everything inside of it as error free facts.

Printed Wiki

[Pointdexter]

Presumaby each copy will be written in pencil and supplied with an eraser?

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'..

ooooohhhh gooodie!

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Personally I can't wait to get the hardcopy of the Robocop disertation.

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).

It must be true...

[ladybugfi]

First we had "it must be true, I read it in a book somewhere", then we had "it must be true, I read it in the internet somewhere". Now we have come a full circle - it must be true since it is in a printed encyclopedia.

I'm not a great supporter of disclaimers, but here I think it would serve well.

Re:800,000 English articles

[b100dian]

It's like printing the Internet!
wget -R . > /dev/lp0

Wouldn't it make more sense....

[teewurstmann]

... to invest in the development of that $100 computer that the MIT is developing (http://news.com.com/The+100+laptop+moves+closer+t o+reality/2100-1044_3-5884683.html)? By the time Wikipedia is printed, it will already be out of date. Maybe investing in cheap internet terminals and a couple of printers would make more sense...

Re:800,000 English articles

[Pichu0102]

You're right, it is considerably large for an English printed version of Wikipedia.
However, most likely the printed Wikipedias will be in the other Wikipedia languages, which contain considerably less articles than the English version.
It'll still be a large book no matter what language it's in, but it will be considerably smaller than the English version of Wikipedia.

True, but not a big deal

[brunes69]

Just yesterday Iw as reading an article on homeostasis, and ran into some obviously erronious material. The article had been defaced (one point even had "ALEX IS GAY" in huge letters"). So, I went in to edit the article, but the copy in the edit tab did not have the errors. At first I thought it was some kind of bug, so I refreshed the article to try to edit it again. To my surprise, it had already been fixed.

Now, I can not say for sure how long it had been defaced before I got there, but that experience left me with the impression that, while you do need to be careful, there are lots of people looking after Wikipedia.

And just to be frank... when you say but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times, I hope you realize that that should be true with *any* source of information. A critical reader should never trust any one source. Every source has bias, and even if it is 100% factual, every source presents the material with its own slant on the facts.

Of course wikipedia sould neve rbe your sole source, but neither should Britannica, or any other single source.

Re:True, but not a big deal

[interiot]

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).

Re:True, but not a big deal

[haggar]

Do you realy believe that edits like "LINUX IS TEH GHEY" are what is the problem? Those that have vandalism written all over them arenot a problem at all. The ones that are a problem, are the edits that you have not even noticed. And the inaccuracies which you have not noticed. For example, in that article on homeostasis, "stasis" is erroneously implied to be a prefix, which it is not. I found this in 15 seconds. If I spent more time, I would find dozens of minor inaccuracies like this, and then would have to spend some time correcting them, but I digress.

Vandalism which is hard to spot is the apparently correct information, throwin in together with a bunch of irrelevant but correct edits. Those you won't notice, unless you have been maintaining the article from it's inception.

Re:True, but not a big deal

[interiot]

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.

Re:What's the point again?

[interiot]

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.

Sometimes I feel wikipedia can't be fixed

[haggar]

I have just finished editing the nationalistic ramblings (disguised as "facts") in a wikipedia entry about a famous scientist and engineer, whose name shall stay secret. I know, however, that this nationalistic vandal will be back, do his edits and then I would have to do mine all over again. Except, at one point I will give up, because I will realize that it's pointless, and I don't have all the time in the world to maintain that entry and protect it from defacement.

As a longtime and way too busy Wikipedia contributor, I say: let it die, or then do some extensive and expensive maintainance. Basically, it will have to resamble more the printed things which Slashdot users so like to deride.

Re:Sometimes I feel wikipedia can't be fixed

[interiot]

I don't think vadanlism is so much of a problem, because that can be more or less easily removed by many different people. I think it's more of a problem that poor editing can bring down the content of Wikipedia overall. Someone who is both an expert in their field and also a great writer can post some brilliant prose, with subtle and precise meanings throughout, that accurately expresses the current consensus of experts in their field. And then someone else can come along and blow away all the subtle distinctions without knowing better. And it's somewhat difficult to remove the less experienced person's edits, because reverting well-intentioned edits can be very contentious unless you can clearly state why the new edits should be removed (which requires still more brilliant writing).

So many pages...

[PhotoGuy]

Wow...This will be a huge job for Google books to scan in...