Daniel Mayer wrote:
One example of the difference is in internal references (or q.v. entries). Even if the 'news style' first section approach is used, the first section of the full Wikipedia article would contain links to articles that don't exist in the concise version.
Oh come on. That is easy to fix - don't mark what would be dead links in a concise version as anything special. This could be done automatically.
But we also often use links to be explanatory, which isn't appropriate for print. On Wikipedia we can say "follower of [[so-and-so]]", but in print, you really should say "follower of [[so-and-so]], who was blah-blah-blah".
Of course, the non-fork solution is to make Wikipedia articles like that. Which I do to some extent, because I don't like, even on the web, the idea of having to click through to another article to make sense of the current one. But it's a massive task, as currently a lot of Wikipedia articles are not fully intelligible on their own, without the links.
-Mark