Maybe there should be a [[:category:printed articles]]. It should ignore personal and educational use with a note at the top saying "Alphascript Publishing used this article in whole or major part for a commercial printing of Wikipedia.". It would be nice of them to create the category and make it complete.
2009/8/17 Jay Litwyn brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca:
Maybe there should be a [[:category:printed articles]]. It should ignore personal and educational use with a note at the top saying "Alphascript Publishing used this article in whole or major part for a commercial printing of Wikipedia.". It would be nice of them to create the category and make it complete.
Huh? The last thing we should be doing is advertising them like that, especially in the encyclopedia.
Pete / the wub
The single best way to kill them is to reprint the exact same books, then sell them at the low low price of cost + 10%. When people start snapping them up like fruitcakes, Alphascript will be finished.
________________________________ From: Peter Coombe thewub.wiki@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 6:08:55 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Alphascript Publishing: 1900+ copy&pasted books from Wikipedia
2009/8/17 Jay Litwyn brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca:
Maybe there should be a [[:category:printed articles]]. It should ignore personal and educational use with a note at the top saying "Alphascript Publishing used this article in whole or major part for a commercial printing of Wikipedia.". It would be nice of them to create the category and make it complete.
Huh? The last thing we should be doing is advertising them like that, especially in the encyclopedia.
Pete / the wub
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Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
The single best way to kill them is to reprint the exact same books, then sell them at the low low price of cost + 10%. When people start snapping them up like fruitcakes, Alphascript will be finished.
From looking at only two books published by Alphascript, "Finnish Paganism" and "Iron"; I think we could choose a much better selection to sell, at a price well below that of Alphascript.
The book on Finnish Paganism lacks the article that has the best overview of the subject: [[Finnish mythology]]; while Iron lacks our articles on most methods of processing the metal, such as [[Bloomery]].
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
The single best way to kill them is to reprint the exact same books, then sell them at the low low price of cost + 10%. When people start snapping them up like fruitcakes, Alphascript will be finished.
Not just the same books, but the same books corrected and updated.
Ec
This won't work. The problem is that these books are not being clearly marketed as printed Wikipedia articles. So, marketing your books as up to date printed versions of Wikipedia articles isn't going to be competing with these books.
I recommend doing a positive campaign where you encourage people to log onto amazon and leave helpful comments and tag and categorize books appropriately.
However, I don't think this is the work of the foundation. I think some active wikipedians and wikimedians should bring this to the community. If I had more energy I would do it myself, and here is what I would do:
1) Write a blog post encouraging people to log onto Amazon and write a short, respectable, and helpful comment on the books so that consumers can understand the situation.
2) Get this blog post translated into a few languages.
3) Write an email that asks the reader to: * Pass this email on to others * Vote the story up on various news aggregator sites (Digg, etc). * Go to the page and read the blog for more details and to take part in this collaborative effort to inform consumers.
4) Send it out to a lot of people (many thousand).
5) Release a short press release about the blog and the people joining in this effort and send that out to various news sources.
-Josh
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
The single best way to kill them is to reprint the exact same books, then
sell them at the low low price of cost + 10%. When people start snapping them up like fruitcakes, Alphascript will be finished.
Not just the same books, but the same books corrected and updated.
Ec
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