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@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:
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 is true. This is called "Systematic bias": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Systemat...
This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become much more apparent in a print edition.
Is that really so bad, though? I'm sure most people will understand. :)
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
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 is true. This is called "Systematic bias": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Systemat...
This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become much more apparent in a print edition.
Is that really so bad, though? I'm sure most people will understand. :)
To get the language right, it is a "systemic" bias rather than a "systematic" one. "Systematic" would imply a wilfull application of bias in an organized way. No Wikipedially aware person is suggesting that.
The quality of articles is extremely variable. Many articles are clearly incomplete, and I blame myself for that as much as anybody else. In the electronic medium we can afford to leave something undone, and leave it for someone else to complete, or maybe come back to finish it next year. If you do that in a print edition it will magnify the amateurishness of the effort. We are all here as amateurs, but we also all want the print edition to be a source of pride in several different ways.
Using the "Medicine" topic to illustrate this was very good. We would do irreperable harm to the credibility of Wikipedia if we rushed into the creation of medical specialty articles just for the sake of making sure that we had something on them.
We can't expect the outsider who has just picked up a copy of the print edition to understand what has led to the article selection. From his perspective, it's not his problem.
Ec