German Wikipedia To Be Published As a Book

David Gerard writes "Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. It will cost 20 Euros, and 1 Euro from each copy will go to Wikimedia. They're editing down the most popular 50,000 articles for the 1,000-page book, to be released in September. Because of the open-source origin of the material, the publisher cannot claim copyright in the book." The German-language Wikipedia is second in size only to the English version, which has 2.3 million articles.

Comments

Citing

[jeffy210]

So does this mean you can cite wikipedia as a valid source since it's in print! (yes, i'm joking)

Oh, great.

[Anonymous Coward]

A book that contains 50,000 poorly cited articles about David Hasselhoff.

Re:Fifty articles on each page?

[hansamurai]

Plus most of the popular pages on the English wikipedia are about busty "actresses" and sex positions. If the German wiki is anything like that, the pictures are going to be too small to enjoy.

I can't wait...

[Ihmhi]

...for some troll edit to end up getting into the book. I hope they edit it really well and carefully read through it all.

"Rammstein is a German band that was formed in kyle is a big fag, Germany. They..."

Re:I can't wait...

[atrocious cowpat]

Actually Rammstein was formed in Kyleisabigfag, Germany. The members of the band would rather have the general public not know this, so whenever this bit of information pops up on wikipedia they mobilize their mindless metal-minions towards another edit-war (DER GRÖSSE EDIT KRIEG)... or so someone would like to have you believe.

Technically it's just Hans-Peter Gümpel, a 14-year old student from the suburbs of Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, who simply can't stand the idea that his favorite DEUTSCHE-TÖT-METALL-ROTZ-KREÜZÜBER-BAND stems from the idyllic town of Kyleisabigfag (Thuringia). Kyleisabigfag, incidentally, is worldwide renown for its floral clock and the biannual Käse-Fest, where the locals let milk go stale for weeks on end, and then have a party about it by rolling the resulting cheese to the nearest train station.

P.S.: The rest of Germany is actually rather embarrassed by the antics of RAMMSTEIN, and would like to apologize in all due form. We know how, and why this happened, but what with censorship on one hand and pseudo-fascist prancers on the other... it was kinda impossible to prevent. Basically you had us coming and going, so we felt we'd just let them do their thing and be ridiculed by the world. Didn't quite work out that way, so sorry, again.

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they think that people in Germany would like to have a hard copy. I'm certain my grandparents (who read tons but do not have a computer) would be interested in a $40-50 edition of this book.

Or even, you know, the local library. Dude, you just mentioned two things that are obsolete: your grandparents and the local library.

Its all in the editing

[Tmack]

How on earth is that going to work, cramming 50,000 articles into 1000 pages?

Earth: Mostly Harmless

Tm