Delirium wrote: 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 Thursday 26 February 2004 22:27, Jimmy Wales wrote: 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?

On Feb 26, 2004, at 9:26 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote: 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 -- ---<>--- -- A house without walls cannot fall. Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org -- ---<>--- --