[Foundation-l] Bertelsmann publishes "Wikipedia Encyclopedia in One Volume"

[Kul Takanao Wadhwa]

Wikimedia Deutschland did a great job of putting this together and
everyone here at the Foundation can't wait to get a copy
to enjoy (although most of us will have to learn German
in a hurry...but I'm sure it will be worth it). I blogged about
it on the Foundation website:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/04/22/wikipedia-in-german-book-form/

Kul Takanao Wadhwa
Head of Business Development
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
kul at wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885 ext. 603

Sebastian Moleski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2008 has started as the year of old school encyclopedias permanently
> relocating to the internet when Brockhaus announced that the current 30
> volume edition would be the last one available in print. It may end as the
> year when trees can yet again wither in the hope that they will end as
> repositories of human knowledge. In a few hours, a well-known publishing
> house will announce the production of a single-volume Wikipedia to be
> available in stores this fall. Prior to this announcement, we wanted to
> provide you with some background and details on this project.
> 
> There have been a number of approaches to publish Wikipedia content in print
> such as the community-developed WikiReaders of a few years ago or the
> WikiPress series of paperbacks produced by DirectMedia in Berlin. Now a new
> project has started with the goal to produce a general encyclopedia based on
> Wikipedia articles. First ideas for a single volume edition were formulated
> some years ago but it wasn't until this year that a publisher was found who
> would turn this vision into reality: this fall, the Bertelsmann Lexikon
> Institut (Wissen Media) will publish the "Wikipedia encyclopedia in one
> volume" in German language.
> 
> The first edition will contain 50,000 articles consisting of the
> introductory paragraphs taken from the corresponding Wikipedia articles. The
> paragraphs usually provide a compact overview of the topic and its
> significance so they are well-suited for being published separately. They
> are comparable in depth and structure to full entries in other single-volume
> encyclopedias. At a price of €19.95 and its size of about 1,000 pages, it
> will be a pretty good value in comparison to similar works. The volume will
> be printed in full color and published as a hardcover with about 100
> pictures taken from Wikipedia as well.
> 
> Topic selection for the first edition was based on page hits collected for
> German Wikipedia. The data was taken from Domas Miuzas' Wikistats (
> http://dammit.lt/wikistats/) and adjusted to reduce the impact of current
> but short-lived events in favor of lastingly popular topics. The list of
> authors for each article will be included in the finished volume and the
> GFDL will be observed as would be expected.
> 
> There are a number of ways in which we see Wikipedia profiting from this
> project:
> 
> 1) The Bertelsmann editors working on the first edition will submit parts of
> their work--such as improvements to article introductions--to Wikipedia
> under the GFDL.
> 
> 2) The accessibility of Wikipedia content will be broadened to a wider range
> of readers. We may even recruit some new authors as a side effect.
> 
> 3) For every copy sold, one Euro goes back to Wikimedia.
> 
> We're looking forward to the response of this forthcoming announcement as
> well as the public availability of the first edition later this year.
> 
> 
> Sebastian Moleski
> Board of Directors
> Wikimedia Deutschland
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