Lightning wrote:
How fast is that wiki->PDF script?
I mean.. after the kinks are worked out I would be very willing to download a dump, mod the program a bit to grab the stuff from the DB directly, and generate a couple of hundred thousand Wikipedia articles in PDF. I could tar and gz these and offer them as a single download or just put them on a couple of file sharing programs under the names wikipedia_$articlename.PDF
May I suggest wikipedia_$articlename_$dateOfGeneration? Thus, while Gnutella users would have no way of knowing whether they have the most recent version, they would at least be able to occasionally look for a more recent version.
I mean I have no clue why anyone would want these since you can just go to the website and see a (most likely) newer and more correct article.. but it'd be a fun experiment Direct Connect, fast track, and gnutella come to mind.... and I mean I guess they could be published to freenet.. although I dont know what the deal is with freenet and PDF...
If someone thinks this is a good idea, tell me please.
I think so, obviously, although, being suicidal, I would much rather have the articles generated dynamically upon request. (This obviously poses a problem if we are to distribute PDFs, the generating of which is time and resource consuming, and I therefore agree that if PDFs are to be distributed they had best be cached in advance.)
As a certain category or a certain topic is populated with articles of a high caliber it might be fun to release PDF formatted "books" or mini encyclopedias of this topic. These could be polished, and put out every couple of months. These files which would be formatted in a manner suitable for printing and stand alone use could be in turn distributed in a limited fashion to certain educational institutions in order to raise awareness of the project.
An example comes to mind. Planetmath.org, user contributed but by no means a wiki, has produced a PDF copy ( http://aux.planetmath.org/book/ ) of its math encyclopedia. This copy I found so useful that I took to printing 50 of its pages in order to get ready for an exam.
People in college have lots of time and ideals. They are the kind of people who love to advocate their ideas too. Younger contributors from non-tech related areas could really help with the widespread awareness of wikipedia and what we have to offer
I seem to recall the issue of school participation being raised once upon a time. Anyway, I am very much in favor of attracting younger contributors, be them children or college students (if a difference is to be found). While ways of attracting such individuals had probably best be discussed at wikipedia-l, I daresay the implementation of theoretical wikiagglomerations (well, it's not catchy, but wikibooks is taken) belong here. I think.
Cheers,
Itai
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org