Jimmy Wales wrote:
- "Wiki is not paper, but Wikipedia 1.0 is paper". The goal of a
push towards 1.0 is specifically to produce a version that's purposefully edited and limited in some minor ways. We use 'Wiki is not paper' as a good reason to be permissive about the addition of relative obscurities, but we hope for a print publisher to pick up Wikipedia 1.0 and distribute it profitably and dirt-cheap to all the people of the world, which means paper and which means constraints.
I'm not sure 1.0 and "paper-wikipedia" are necessarily the same thing.
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
This would require a clear plan -- * how much space do we have? * how many articles can we have in each subject? * how many words do we have for each article -- how do we weigh them relatively ... etc -- basically, all the sorts of editorial decisions that Brittanica & co have to make
This sort of work would best be done by a relatively small group of editors -- this is why I don't think that "paper" is the same as 1.0 But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time ago about producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)