Timwi,
It's too hard to keep a running list with more than 100 links.
How about an invisible marker like {ready for print} near the top of the article text?
Ed Poor
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
It's too hard to keep a running list with more than 100 links.
How about an invisible marker like {ready for print} near the top of the article text?
I think we need to split out versions somewhere else, because we're looking for concise articles, not full encyclopedia articles. Simply marking [[World War II]] as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of World War II.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
I think we need to split out versions somewhere else, because we're looking for concise articles, not full encyclopedia articles. Simply marking [[World War II]] as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of World War II.
Maybe you're right. Probably you're right.
But I wonder. It's up to us, presumably, to determine the content, although of course we want the result to be useful.
We have 214,720 articles. Let's assume that this is a total of X pages. But we need to hypothetically pare it down to X/3, i.e. 1/3 as much total content.
We can pare it down by editing longer articles into shorter articles. Or we can (also) pare it down by simply omitting articles that aren't as "important" in some sense.
I have here a very old concise encyclopedia. It's printed with 3 columns of text.
World War II takes up 2 full pages of fairly fine print. Francis Scott Key takes up about 1/3 of 1 column, i.e. about 1/9th of a page.
The Wikipedia entry looks similar to the Francis Scott Key entry. Our World War II entry looks similar, too.
I'm going to try to get an estimate of how many words are in Wikipedia, and how many words are in this book. That'll give us a better idea of what we're looking at.
--Jimbo
On 02/26/04 21:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I have here a very old concise encyclopedia. It's printed with 3 columns of text. World War II takes up 2 full pages of fairly fine print. Francis Scott Key takes up about 1/3 of 1 column, i.e. about 1/9th of a page. The Wikipedia entry looks similar to the Francis Scott Key entry. Our World War II entry looks similar, too.
Consider, however, articles like [[John Kerry]] or [[Howard Dean]] (or similar issues of current history). They have incredible amounts of detail - of high quality - because they're updated almost live. But they wouldn't be so relevant for a concise print encyclopedia.
Suggested step: pick your editors to manage the 'print' branch and let them have their way. As in, the power to say "No."
- d.
On Thursday 26 February 2004 22:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
We have 214,720 articles. Let's assume that this is a total of X pages. But we need to hypothetically pare it down to X/3, i.e. 1/3 as much total content.
We can pare it down by editing longer articles into shorter articles. Or we can (also) pare it down by simply omitting articles that aren't as "important" in some sense.
Just a few thoughts:
While looking for articles that should not go into the paper, I think that there shoud also be a consideration of articles that should go into the paper but are not there. Of course, not everything could be added, but it would be very stupid and easy to fix, for example, if there would be articles on all kings from some royal house except one or two, or on all electronic components except one or two, or on all battles of the Second World War except one or two... at least stubs on the absent articles should be created.
One of criterias for inclusion probably should be importance for other articles. For example, it might be decided that only places with more then 10,000 inhabitants go onto paper, but a smaller place should also go if it is birth place of a famous person who will have a paper article or a site of a battle which will have a paper article etc.
Paper encyclopedias also have "links" among articles, for example marked with -> . Now, for obvious reason they are not as often as links on Wikipedia. I think that there should be a way of marking some of links as more important then others so that they would be preserved on paper. Perhaps these should stay in electronic edition as well, it would be nice to know which links are the most relevant; if so, it would not even require changes in software.
I hope that lists will also go onto the paper. Having a themed index at the end would be wonderful - is there an encyclopedia that has it?
Delirium wrote:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
It's too hard to keep a running list with more than 100 links.
How about an invisible marker like {ready for print} near the top of the article text?
I think we need to split out versions somewhere else, because we're looking for concise articles, not full encyclopedia articles. Simply marking [[World War II]] as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of World War II.
Agreed. Simply marking an article as "ready for print" would effectively freeze it from further editing. The living Wikipedia article needs to be continually editable so that the version that is on the 2nd printed edition can show further improvements.
Ec
On Feb 26, 2004, at 9:26 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
I think we need to split out versions somewhere else, because we're looking for concise articles, not full encyclopedia articles. Simply marking [[World War II]] as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of World War II.
Agreed. Simply marking an article as "ready for print" would effectively freeze it from further editing. The living Wikipedia article needs to be continually editable so that the version that is on the 2nd printed edition can show further improvements.
Looking towards the future, would it be feasible to define a markup for exporting print versions of articles? I'm thinking "Hide this section", "Replace this with that", and similar. The export system would also remove external links and possibly do other automate-able tasks. Then we can maintain a single edit history, freeze good versions of articles, and be able to incorporate good changes into the frozen copy.
Peter
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Ray Saintonge wrote
Simply marking an article as "ready for print" would effectively freeze it from further editing. The living Wikipedia article needs to be continually editable so that the version that is on the 2nd printed edition can show further improvements.
Agree. The threads on this issue are already a little tangled. I agree wholeheartedly with comments about the copyediting being key.
Invisible HTML comments could be used to insert standard messages such as 'above here is written in news style as a candidate short print article', without much inhibiting further editing. Presumably anyone who cared enough to put an article forward by adding this comment would watch edits to those pages. Perhaps that and another possible , less specific, message: 'this page is currently being considered for the print WP'.
Charles