Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
Mandrakesoft will take legal responsibilities for this publication and is ready to donate some money to the Wikimedia Foundation. The amount is still to be decided.
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
As you may have noticed, a mention about this was included in the press release and the newsletter with the authorization of Mandrakesoft who will also publish a press release about this project.
The summary below is also available on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft
== Points fixed so far ==
* It will first be sold on Mandrake web site, then included in the next version of the distribution.
* It will include only the current version of the English and French distribution. Mandrakesoft publishes a French version sold in French speaking countries and an English (international) version sold elsewhere in the world. The English Wikipedia will be sold with the international version of Mandrake Linux.
* Mandrakesoft asks that the Wikimedia Foundation provide them with a master DVD.
* Mandrakesoft will take the legal responsibility for this publication.
* Fair use images should be removed as the publication has to comply with worldwide copyright standards, not US only. Also images without proper licensing information have to be removed.
== Questions that need answering ==
* Do we include only complete articles or the whole of Wikipedia including stubs? * How do we package it? Several possibilities, see the page on meta.
== What you can do ==
So we need some help to complete this project. * Work is needed to provide proper lisensing information on all images in the English Wikipedia. * Help packaging. Help with technical knowledge is needed here. Med and Hashar, among others, are already working on this.
Thanks,
Yann
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
At 04:20 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed. It'd be not much different than the many websites that are already running static mirrors of Wikipedia content.
A lot of articles might wind up looking a little messy when images get stripped out, too. Hopefully the stripping process will be clever enough to take out the relevant [[Image:]] tags, but there will be leftover tables and divs and whatnot that get missed by this. Oh well.
On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed.
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
That's all very interesting, but did you have to tell me about it FIVE TIMES???
Please follow up to wikipedia-l.
-- Tim Starling
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org