Hi all,
Huge libraries (large / U.S. Ivy League universities' libraries, public libraries in world-class cities, Library of Congress, etc.) spend unbelievable amounts of money on buying books and magazines every year. Books and magazines are great, but there are certain subjects with no relevant books or magazine articles available. Example: TV. For any popular TV show, Wikipedia has a main article and numerous subarticles on characters, episodes, and so on. For some subjects, Wikipedia is truly the best choice for information.
I propose we band together and start a WikiPrint service. We could somehow make it easy for schools, corporations and libraries to print out subsets of Wikipedia: e.g. if they want a PDF of a whole category to send to an online print-on-demand shop, we compile the PDF for them, add a nice cover page etc., and send it to the shop for them if they like. They would pay us for the service.
I am not sure if this would be a for-profit service or a free service (e.g. part of the WikiPress system). For-profit would mean we would be able to promote ourselves more and we would be more motivated to do well.
Would this be a useful / popular service? What kinds of customers would come to us? For example, a question for you librarians among us: would libraries be interested in such a service?
Jason Spiro Computer programming student and Wikipedian Toronto, Canada
There's already a site that does something like this, though I dont think it's for institutions, more for private use. See http://pediapress.com/
On 9/12/06, jasonspiro4 jasonspiro4+news@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Huge libraries (large / U.S. Ivy League universities' libraries, public libraries in world-class cities, Library of Congress, etc.) spend unbelievable amounts of money on buying books and magazines every year. Books and magazines are great, but there are certain subjects with no relevant books or magazine articles available. Example: TV. For any popular TV show, Wikipedia has a main article and numerous subarticles on characters, episodes, and so on. For some subjects, Wikipedia is truly the best choice for information.
I propose we band together and start a WikiPrint service. We could somehow make it easy for schools, corporations and libraries to print out subsets of Wikipedia: e.g. if they want a PDF of a whole category to send to an online print-on-demand shop, we compile the PDF for them, add a nice cover page etc., and send it to the shop for them if they like. They would pay us for the service.
I am not sure if this would be a for-profit service or a free service (e.g . part of the WikiPress system). For-profit would mean we would be able to promote ourselves more and we would be more motivated to do well.
Would this be a useful / popular service? What kinds of customers would come to us? For example, a question for you librarians among us: would libraries be interested in such a service?
Jason Spiro Computer programming student and Wikipedian Toronto, Canada
-- Jason Spiro: computer consulting with a smile. I also do computer training and spyware removal for homes and businesses. Call or email for a FREE 5-minute consultation. Satisfaction guaranteed. jasonspiro4@gmail.com / 416-781-5938 / Skype ID: jasonspiro
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I think we first need to finetune the quality of such articles. Sure, for every TV show, wikipedia has an article. But many (if not most) articles are stubs, they are subject to vandalism and lack references. First we need to bring them up to, say, good article status.
On 9/13/06, jasonspiro4 jasonspiro4+news@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Huge libraries (large / U.S. Ivy League universities' libraries, public libraries in world-class cities, Library of Congress, etc.) spend unbelievable amounts of money on buying books and magazines every year. Books and magazines are great, but there are certain subjects with no relevant books or magazine articles available. Example: TV. For any popular TV show, Wikipedia has a main article and numerous subarticles on characters, episodes, and so on. For some subjects, Wikipedia is truly the best choice for information.
I propose we band together and start a WikiPrint service. We could somehow make it easy for schools, corporations and libraries to print out subsets of Wikipedia: e.g. if they want a PDF of a whole category to send to an online print-on-demand shop, we compile the PDF for them, add a nice cover page etc., and send it to the shop for them if they like. They would pay us for the service.
I am not sure if this would be a for-profit service or a free service (e.g. part of the WikiPress system). For-profit would mean we would be able to promote ourselves more and we would be more motivated to do well.
Would this be a useful / popular service? What kinds of customers would come to us? For example, a question for you librarians among us: would libraries be interested in such a service?
Jason Spiro Computer programming student and Wikipedian Toronto, Canada
-- Jason Spiro: computer consulting with a smile. I also do computer training and spyware removal for homes and businesses. Call or email for a FREE 5-minute consultation. Satisfaction guaranteed. jasonspiro4@gmail.com / 416-781-5938 / Skype ID: jasonspiro
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 13/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
I think we first need to finetune the quality of such articles. Sure, for every TV show, wikipedia has an article. But many (if not most) articles are stubs, they are subject to vandalism and lack references. First we need to bring them up to, say, good article status.
The infrastructure for the printed wikireaders described here is a separate issue from the article content - there's no reason to wait on it.
I think having a printed copy of an article to hand will show its flaws quite glaringly and lead to improved articles directly ;-) It will be particularly nice if this is per-category.
- d.
I meant that I question this:
For any popular TV show, Wikipedia has a main article and numerous subarticles on characters, episodes, and so on. For some subjects, Wikipedia is truly the best choice for information.
I don't agree that Wikipedia is the best choice for information based on my comments below; article quality is still generally substandard. Its brilliant considering we're not paying more than two-three employees to run the whole thing (or are we..?) and we have significant quantity, but we first need to make sure the content printed is suitable for the purpose. And what about unobvious vandalism? Just today I removed a "Dr. <something> has big glasses" from an article, it had been there for quite a while and I only noticed it because we had to visit the article for a project. if we have comments like that in articles, god knows what will happen.
On 9/13/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
I think we first need to finetune the quality of such articles. Sure, for every TV show, wikipedia has an article. But many (if not most) articles are stubs, they are subject to vandalism and lack references. First we need to bring them up to, say, good article status.
The infrastructure for the printed wikireaders described here is a separate issue from the article content - there's no reason to wait on it.
I think having a printed copy of an article to hand will show its flaws quite glaringly and lead to improved articles directly ;-) It will be particularly nice if this is per-category.
- d.
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