Wikipedia Offers a Book Creator

Kilrah_il writes "Wikipedia recently added an option to create a book from your chosen entries: 'That's it, the book creator has gone live in the English Wikipedia! A few hours ago, the book creator has been made available to all users of the English Wikipedia. This feature, which allows all readers to create books from Wikipedia articles, has been until now only available to logged-in users. It has been available in other Wikipedias for a longer time, it's now available on the English Wikipedia, for all, without restrictions.' You can either download the book in PDF format for free or have it printed and sent to you via PediaPress with 10% of the total going to the Wikimedia Foundation."

Comments

This could be handy while travelling

[BigDXLT]

Should be a good way to kill 3 hours on a plane, don't you think? Just need some sort of script where all articles linked from some random topic up to a set depth (let's say 6, for traditional sake) are downloaded into the PDF.

Re:This could be handy while travelling

[Anonymous Coward]

6 might be a tad high.

Say each article links to 10 other articles, and for simplicity we'll assume there are no circular link cycles (a very big assumption, but I reduced the expected number of links to help accommodate this).

Then a depth of 6 means that you'll end up with 10^6 or a million articles, almost a third of the English wikipedia...

Though you could probably develop a heuristic to reduce that a huge amount.

Re:This could be handy while travelling

[MichaelSmith]

The "Add Whole Categories" feature might be a better way to go.

Slightly OT: knew these people who owned a second hand book shop. One day this guy turns up in a Mercedes convertible. He is outfitting a new holiday house with impressive books and can they help him out? Of course they said yes, to the tune of thousands of dollars.

So I wonder if there is a niche for printing and binding mass quantities of the wikipedia so you can line a wall.

Re:This could be handy while travelling

[Ihmhi]

You could just filter out the Dragonball Z articles, and then that cuts the total down to around 250,000.

Hasn't this been done before?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Wikipedia is just following in the footsteps of Alphascript

link

[dnwq]

the book creator.

the Wikimedia press release

(note the date - yes, december 2007!)

Re:PDF Books

[mwvdlee]

Exactly what I thought.
There are a number of Wikipedia pages I reference a lot while working. Having them printed would be more convenient.
It would be nice if you had expert-compiled article lists on specific topics, to make it easier to compile such a book.

Re:But what about the links!

[Ethanol-fueled]

Besides your annoying drunken all-caps, you raise a good point:

Wikipedia and Google are implicitly dependent on each other. Google something you don't know about and the wikipedia article is always in the top 3. Become engorged in the Wikipedia article, drift, and your trail of links represents your stream of consciousness -- your thought processes, which are a lot easier to quantifiy(and exploit) when you stay in the Wikipedia instead of jumping from site-to-site.

Putting on the tinfoil hat, that's probably the reason why Wikipedia dosen't charge for the "free" PDFs as passes off the printed versions as an Ubuntu-style charity.

Re:PDF Books

[Ihmhi]

I can see it now...

To complete the circuit, the next (and most important) step is KYLE STANLEY RULES JIM O'TOOLE IS A COCKSUCKER or else the entire unit will overlord and likely start an electrical fire.

Previous Slashdot article

[alanw]

A month ago is was mentioned here that parasites were advertising on Amazon print-on-demand articles from Wikipedia

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Demand-Publisher-VDM-Infects-Amazon

Re:Previous Slashdot article

[The Archon V2.0]

A month ago is was mentioned here that parasites were advertising on Amazon print-on-demand articles from Wikipedia

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Demand-Publisher-VDM-Infects-Amazon

Oh, now you're being unfair. Surely a book called "Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit." couldn't be all bad, could it?

Re:Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

You wear out the 'u' and 'g' letters on your daisywheel printer?

Already done

[identity0]

Sadly, this is already being done as fraud by These guys, who have over 39,000 separate titles printed, all apparently just wikipedia articles bound with stock photos. It seems to be done by machine, given the amount of books and the odd titles and stock photos.

And they're selling them for over $50 each, with no notice that they are just wikipedia articles!! I only noticed because I was searching for books on an obscure topic and found multiple books by this "author".

tl;dr: DO NOT BUY BOOKS FROM Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome, and John McBrewster

Re:PDF Books

[langelgjm]

I'm kind of suprised the only options available are PDF and ODT... would have been nice to see MOBI or EPUB formats, too, to make this more appealing to ebook users. Of course it's not hard to convert them yourself, just adds an extra step, and I'm not sure how well formatting will be preserved.

no epub?

[cas2000]

PDF is crap for ebook readers. why not epub?