They're taking the lead summary of each of 50,000 articles (out of a million total), or even the first paragraph. A well-formed Wikipedia article should be written as an inverted pyramid, making this easy and still useful to the reader.
Particularly in Wikipedia - because we don't have named authors, references are of fantastic importance because the reader has to be able to check out the article's credentials just from the text itself.
The book articles will be the intro of each article. Per WP:LEAD (and a similar style guideline on German Wikipedia), the intro is supposed to be a standalone short article on its own. The idea is that, in the ideal case, you can skim whatever amount of an article you have time to - a sentence, a para, the intro, the whole thing - and be as reasonably informed by that as you need to be.
The money is (I think) for the use of the trademark in marketing it. (The Wikipedia name and puzzle globe are highly respected and valuable trademarks.)
In practice, whenever anyone contributes cash to the Foundation, the community of contrary geeks goes over all articles on them with a querulous-toothed comb. The articles generally go very negative for a while, in fact, then back to neutrality. e.g. Virgin Unite after their sponsorship during the 2006 fundraiser.
Check out the SOS Children DVD distro. They checked it over for use in their own schools.
If you keep in mind how Wikipedia is written and that the website is a live working draft - like running CVS HEAD - you'll be fine. But of course many readers want to be able not to think when reading. (I bet they have fun on teh intarweb.)
The point here is really that it'll be checked by professional editors... just like people keep asking for Wikipedia to do, but which of course is difficult to scale with wiki-style and -scale production.
Another example, for English Wikipedia, is the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection For Schools, where they took Wikipedia content to use in their own schools in third-world countries, and make sure their distro of it was good quality.
Anyone can copy the whole thing, minus of course the Wikipedia trademarks, and release a copy too. Indian printers producing copies on tissue-thin paper? Go for it, just make it GFDL. Compare Red Hat Enterprise Linux ($$$) versus CentOS ($0).
You're whining vigorously but haven't suggested any actual solution as yet. If the disclaimer was in 48-point blinking red the people who need to read it still wouldn't. I eagerly await the obvious, elegant and workable solution no-one's thought of yet but you have.
The politics is largely weird and stupid, and feel free to quote me on that far and wide. The problem is that massive collaboration is hard, and "Assume good faith" makes much more sense when you realise it's a restatement of "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."
Basically, you need to (a) use any supernatural powers of sainthood you have (b) be happy to let things go for six months when other people are thinking in terms of six hours. My wikistress promptly went right down when I stopped looking at my watchlist, ever.
That said, I'm still on Wikipedia after four years. That's because it's CRACK. TASTY TASTY CRACK. THEIR BRAINS TASTE LIKE DELICIOUS CANDY.
The disclaimer is only linked on each and every individual page, and one day someone complaining might actually read it. You can lead a horse to clues, etc.
See more detailed and practical suggestions here. Basically, you can have a fact-checked Wikipedia of a few thousand articles, or you can have something of useful breadth and a couple of million articles. Unless you can come up with a method of fact-checking that scales to that extent.
If enough people agreed with you, you could do quite well. e.g. when almost the entire Spanish wikipedia got up one day and left to form Enciclopedia Libre.
Possibly the problem is getting enough of a community together.
ODF does in fact aim to get format consistent between different ODF implementations - so if your document uses ODF that works in both OOo and KWord (which are completely independent implementations), your document should be identical between the two, and if it isn't there's a bug in one or both.
FWIW, this is something we hope to address slightly with the Flagged Revisions extension - see quality.wikimedia.org. The idea is that casual readers (not logged in) see the last not-obviously-awful version, and only logged-in readers see the live working draft. This is due to roll out on the German Wikipedia some time soonishishish, and other wikis (including English Wikipedia) sometime maybe later ishishish.
That doesn't address warranting that information is quality-checked and fact-checked over 2 million articles. We've yet to come up with a method that scales other than the present one. The Flagged Revisions extension can be adapted to this end, but someone has to be willing to do the work toward this.
So far the least worst approach has been hand-picking and checking articles, which has resulted in Wikipedia 0.5 and the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools (an interesting one - they used Wikipedia as raw material for an educational encyclopedia in their own schools). But these give you thousands of articles instead of millions. And one of Wikipedia's real strengths is its incredible breadth.
It would be because the rest of the English-speaking world is way left of the US. And in fact English Wikipedia has a large contributor base from non-English-speaking countries, because English is the current lingua franca. It could be that the rest of the world averages out to what the rest of the world averages out to, and it's the US that's skewed right.
I do a lot of press for Wikipedia in the UK, and I've yet to speak to a journalist who doesn't use Wikipedia as a handy universal backgrounder. Which is what it is, after all. However, journalists should be able to handle sources of questionable reliability. I expect it's better they say "according to Wikipedia" than fail to say "according to Wikipedia"...
1. Despite your impassioned defence of the right of readers not to have to think ever, we've still yet to perfect the Wikipedia that works if the reader insists on being stupid.
2. Google's rankings are its own business. If we didn't get as much business from Google... our bandwidth bills would probably be much lower.
I knew the Galactic Lord Xenu. I worked with the Galactic Lord Xenu. And you, sir, are no Galactic Lord Xenu.
Pfft, have you ever tried opening a complex Office or Word document in Microsoft Office? As awesome a product as it is, it's downright lousy for handling things like image filters and pixel-perfect positioning on Word documents. It tries, yes, and sometimes it does OK, but it's far from perfect. That's because Word actually lays out the page according to the printer driver that happens to be default on that particular PC today. So Word is, quite literally, not compatible with the same version of itself on the same operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Go for it - keep it GFDL and make a few bucks :-D
They're taking the lead summary of each of 50,000 articles (out of a million total), or even the first paragraph. A well-formed Wikipedia article should be written as an inverted pyramid, making this easy and still useful to the reader.
Particularly in Wikipedia - because we don't have named authors, references are of fantastic importance because the reader has to be able to check out the article's credentials just from the text itself.
The book articles will be the intro of each article. Per WP:LEAD (and a similar style guideline on German Wikipedia), the intro is supposed to be a standalone short article on its own. The idea is that, in the ideal case, you can skim whatever amount of an article you have time to - a sentence, a para, the intro, the whole thing - and be as reasonably informed by that as you need to be.
The money is (I think) for the use of the trademark in marketing it. (The Wikipedia name and puzzle globe are highly respected and valuable trademarks.)
In practice, whenever anyone contributes cash to the Foundation, the community of contrary geeks goes over all articles on them with a querulous-toothed comb. The articles generally go very negative for a while, in fact, then back to neutrality. e.g. Virgin Unite after their sponsorship during the 2006 fundraiser.
Don't forget, we have the actual readership numbers!
i.e., b*gg*r-all, as you correctly surmise ;-)
Check out the SOS Children DVD distro. They checked it over for use in their own schools.
If you keep in mind how Wikipedia is written and that the website is a live working draft - like running CVS HEAD - you'll be fine. But of course many readers want to be able not to think when reading. (I bet they have fun on teh intarweb.)
And of course newspaper readers are increasingly moving to the web editions ...
The point here is really that it'll be checked by professional editors ... just like people keep asking for Wikipedia to do, but which of course is difficult to scale with wiki-style and -scale production.
Another example, for English Wikipedia, is the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection For Schools, where they took Wikipedia content to use in their own schools in third-world countries, and make sure their distro of it was good quality.
Anyone can copy the whole thing, minus of course the Wikipedia trademarks, and release a copy too. Indian printers producing copies on tissue-thin paper? Go for it, just make it GFDL. Compare Red Hat Enterprise Linux ($$$) versus CentOS ($0).
You're whining vigorously but haven't suggested any actual solution as yet. If the disclaimer was in 48-point blinking red the people who need to read it still wouldn't. I eagerly await the obvious, elegant and workable solution no-one's thought of yet but you have.
No, 2008 is the year of Linux on the laptop. Specifically the tiny things from Asus and co.
It's small, but it's getting there.
The politics is largely weird and stupid, and feel free to quote me on that far and wide. The problem is that massive collaboration is hard, and "Assume good faith" makes much more sense when you realise it's a restatement of "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."
Basically, you need to (a) use any supernatural powers of sainthood you have (b) be happy to let things go for six months when other people are thinking in terms of six hours. My wikistress promptly went right down when I stopped looking at my watchlist, ever.
That said, I'm still on Wikipedia after four years. That's because it's CRACK. TASTY TASTY CRACK. THEIR BRAINS TASTE LIKE DELICIOUS CANDY.
The disclaimer is only linked on each and every individual page, and one day someone complaining might actually read it. You can lead a horse to clues, etc.
See more detailed and practical suggestions here. Basically, you can have a fact-checked Wikipedia of a few thousand articles, or you can have something of useful breadth and a couple of million articles. Unless you can come up with a method of fact-checking that scales to that extent.
If enough people agreed with you, you could do quite well. e.g. when almost the entire Spanish wikipedia got up one day and left to form Enciclopedia Libre.
Possibly the problem is getting enough of a community together.
ODF does in fact aim to get format consistent between different ODF implementations - so if your document uses ODF that works in both OOo and KWord (which are completely independent implementations), your document should be identical between the two, and if it isn't there's a bug in one or both.
FWIW, this is something we hope to address slightly with the Flagged Revisions extension - see quality.wikimedia.org. The idea is that casual readers (not logged in) see the last not-obviously-awful version, and only logged-in readers see the live working draft. This is due to roll out on the German Wikipedia some time soonishishish, and other wikis (including English Wikipedia) sometime maybe later ishishish.
That doesn't address warranting that information is quality-checked and fact-checked over 2 million articles. We've yet to come up with a method that scales other than the present one. The Flagged Revisions extension can be adapted to this end, but someone has to be willing to do the work toward this.
So far the least worst approach has been hand-picking and checking articles, which has resulted in Wikipedia 0.5 and the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools (an interesting one - they used Wikipedia as raw material for an educational encyclopedia in their own schools). But these give you thousands of articles instead of millions. And one of Wikipedia's real strengths is its incredible breadth.
It would be because the rest of the English-speaking world is way left of the US. And in fact English Wikipedia has a large contributor base from non-English-speaking countries, because English is the current lingua franca. It could be that the rest of the world averages out to what the rest of the world averages out to, and it's the US that's skewed right.
So fork it. It's open content.
I do a lot of press for Wikipedia in the UK, and I've yet to speak to a journalist who doesn't use Wikipedia as a handy universal backgrounder. Which is what it is, after all. However, journalists should be able to handle sources of questionable reliability. I expect it's better they say "according to Wikipedia" than fail to say "according to Wikipedia" ...
This has, of course, already happened.
1. Despite your impassioned defence of the right of readers not to have to think ever, we've still yet to perfect the Wikipedia that works if the reader insists on being stupid.
2. Google's rankings are its own business. If we didn't get as much business from Google ... our bandwidth bills would probably be much lower.
I knew the Galactic Lord Xenu. I worked with the Galactic Lord Xenu. And you, sir, are no Galactic Lord Xenu.
Pfft, have you ever tried opening a complex Office or Word document in Microsoft Office? As awesome a product as it is, it's downright lousy for handling things like image filters and pixel-perfect positioning on Word documents. It tries, yes, and sometimes it does OK, but it's far from perfect. That's because Word actually lays out the page according to the printer driver that happens to be default on that particular PC today. So Word is, quite literally, not compatible with the same version of itself on the same operating system.