I believe the print edition will indeed require "a ton of editing." But
there is a far more serious issue I believe is lurking in the wings:
unevenness of coverage.
For example, take a look at the article on "medicine." On close
inspection, it is mainly an organization scheme with a list of links,
which in many cases are themselves are lists of links, and so forth.
Within this tree, quite a lot of the entries are unlinked. In the print
edition, can we leave out an article on "medicine?" Can the article on
medicine refer to "thoracic surgery" when there's no article on
thoracic surgery? Is it acceptable to have articles on general surgery,
neurosurgery, otolaryngology, orthopedic surgery, poastic surgery, and
urology, but not on cardiovascular surgery, maxillofacial surgery,
pedicatric surgery, thoracic surgery, and vascular surgery?
Who's going to write all the missing articles?
A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
widely. This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become
much more apparent in a print edition.
Actually, the medicine example isn't a good one because most of the
articles that _are_ there--that is, specifically those that are linked
to by the Medicine page or the tree of links it points to--are not very
good. Which, of course, raises another question...
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at
http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/