I will follow with great interest the print version project. I would never have expected Wikipedia itself to work as well as it does so I hope to be pleasantly surprised and that the negativism I am about to spew will turn out to be utterly misguided. However...
I suspect that producing a print version will magnify many of Wikipedia's weak points and minimize many of its strong points. One point about web Wikipedia is that there is no overview, and consequently the variation in style, quality, and depth of coverage is not directly obvious. Flipping through a print book will make this much more apparent.
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.
Another problem is that I think that to come up to peoples' expectation in print versions, a large fraction of the output will have to be actively edited (for tyops, repeated words words, and to fully complying with grammatical and language standards). Will people stand for a mixture of British and American spelling? How many minutes per article will it take to copyedit to print-Wikipedia standards.
And despite the perfectly clear disclaimer on the every edit page that explains that you are donating your work, I suspect that some people who see the work they did for free appear in a bookstore with a price tag on it will be upset. And I think copyright violations could be a minefield. Do you think every single one will be caught? Whatever the theory, I expect that in practice the consequences of a copyright violation in a print version will be more serious than on the Web. What if some print encyclopedia company were to act like SCO and assert that they have found tens of thousands of individual sentences lifted from their print version by hundreds of contributors (and that they won't tell anyone which they are?) Even assuming their case is no stronger than SCOs it could be a substantial nuisance.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@world.std.com alternate: dpbsmith@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 Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
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
Jimmy Wales wrote:
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.
For articles which are too extensive for this, why not add a link on [[Stuff]] to [[Stuff {Concise}]]? The script to compile all the articles in the end could lok for this automagically, and include the Concise version instead of the "real" article.
Magnus