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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.
Obviously, this book isn't for those with net access everywhere from their work place to their living room couch. There are still a lot of people without any net access, for that matter. This book with its emphasis on popular topics which may not be covered in your other tree-based encyclopedias could be useful for all those without access to that living thing. After two or three years, at the price of 20 Euros, people can get the new edition of the book to catch up.
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.
There's a reason we put things into hard copy. It's so that we always have them. Might be a waste of trees, also might be a great idea if the world has an unfortunate energy crisis looming
My work here is dung.
I see your point, but on the other hand, new movies are always being created and thus the filmographies of all the people involved are constantly changing. Unless you restricted the print-form to solely those entries of actors etc. who had passed on and made it essentially a film history book, you're necessarily putting a short window on its relevance.
Whereas with Wikipedia, while further edits are certainly possible, there's nothing actually new happening wrt say the Expressionist Movement, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Juniper Bushes. If the article as it stands is good and essentially complete, then it isn't inherently a bad idea to capture it and put it in a fixed format. There may be further edits that improve the article, but that's not so different than a future edition of a print encyclopedia, and in fact if the print version takes off then there would almost certainly be such.
So while it is true that making a print version of Wikipedia loses some of the inherent appeal of the WP, it also makes a lot more sense than a print version of IMDB, and could actually be a useful and cheaper alternative to other print encyclopedias which never had that dynamism to begin with.
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No reason to worry. Wikipedia will continue to live and breath, just as your cat, child, or spouse continue to live and breath when you take a snapshot of them. A snapshot might not be completely up to date, but it can be much more convenient than having your cat, child, or spouse on your desk or in your pocket everyday.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
How on earth is that going to work, cramming 50,000 articles into 1000 pages? They could edit each article down to a single paragraph and you'd still need a magnifying glass to read it.
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Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there.
That's a good thing. The fact that WP's nature makes you inherently suspicious means that you have the correct mentality when reading it, as opposed to say Britannica which naturally tends to have an air of authority about it when in reality you should be equally suspicious of what you read there.
Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors.
How many of them would seriously damage the understanding of a layman browsing the subject? As in, they're not trying to actually put what they read into practice, but are trying to gain a general and basic knowledge set?
I remember reading through aforementioned Britannica when I had a copy in my parents' home years ago, and finding quite a few errors in the computer-related articles. But like a lot of the errors I find on WP, they're mostly factual errors of some minutia which while clearly false wouldn't actually matter much unless you were for some reason depending on them to re-create what the article is talking about.
Which you should never do, whether it's WP or EB.
The enemies of Democracy are
I sincerely hope that when you read topics upon which you are an expert and find they contain flaws you edit them accordingly.