tarquin-
But "Paper" is definitely something we need to look into. However, it is more complex than sifting -- for example, we'd need a single article on "Lord of the Rings" that we would have to distill from the current dozens on characters, places, films, etc
Count me as a supporter of that idea for the online version as well ;-). Truthfully, we need a better way to handle multiple versions of a page -- effectively something like branches in CVS. This is useful for handling protected pages (edit a branch copy of the page and merge changes into main page once a certain time has elapsed or when a sysop approves the changes), for handling temp pages, and for handling permanent branches for the printed version. To do this we would need some good merging code which would also be useful to mostly get rid of those damn edit conflicts. Of course we would have to be careful to avoid overbranching into POV versions, perhaps by requiring each new branch to be approved in consensus.
We'll also need a flag for whether to include an article in the printed version or not (at this point the number of page-flags is getting so big that it is becoming increasingly useful to separate them into a meta namespace).
Hehehe, lots of work for our team of trained code monkeys ;-)
But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time ago about producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)
So do I. How cheap can we get? It might be more cost effective to build Wikipedia reader computers using old machines and cheap harddrives in the single digit gigabyte range (of course that requires the cheap availability of electric power, which makes it a non-starter for the poorest countries). With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro for embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).
Regards,
Erik