Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
Another problem is that producing a respectable-looking print version will, I think, require a high degree of selectivity and quality control and a fairly rigid approval process by editors who in turn will have to be approved... and articles frozen after approval. That is, exactly the opposite of the Wikipedia creation process.
I think it's important to combat this notion repeatedly until it dies. :-) I do not anticipate in any way "freezing" articles. Development on Wikipedia can and should continue as always.
What I envision is pointers-to-versions rather than freezes or forks.
Just to be clear, because I've spoken firmly against forks earlier this morning, there will of course have to be some very minor and last minute "fork" in the sense of final formatting and copyediting. Let's say we deliver a product such that the print publisher needs to cut out a few dozen pages in order to fit some print constraints -- that's going to happen after we've handed it over to them, and will be a minor fork in that sense.
I'm hopeful for now that we can produce this thing without needing to do massive rewrites of 50,000 articles. I'm hopeful that we can meet the size constraints mostly by selectivity of which articles to include.
--Jimbo