On 12/22/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick the "useful articles". It might pay off in the really long term, but it'd require a huge investment. And due to the GFDL some other company could just come along and take the results of that huge investment and drive you out of business anyway. I'm not at all surprised no one is doing it.
They certainly didn't for de:. Oh, wait ...
- d.
You're referring to the producers of the DVD, I assume. I don't know a whole lot about that project but I assumed they used some automated method to select articles for inclusion (there was a mention of only using articles which were last edited by a certain selection of logged in users), not that they had someone go through each one by hand.
I guess it could be worth it to have someone give a quick one minute glance to each article. I wouldn't remove stubs though, they're a huge part of what makes Wikipedia so great. For "only" 200,000 articles at $6/hour it'd cost under $20K. Of course, that kind of assumes a DVD distribution where the barriers to entry are a bit higher than web distribution. It's not like many people are going to pay $10 a pop to read a free encyclopedia on the web.
Anthony