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

[Ziko van Dijk]

I was curious how the German press will react. Up to now, Google news
reports about 103 newspaper on-line articles. Most of them simply tell by
their own words what they learned from the news agency dpa. Frankfurter
Allgemeine, the most important newspaper (center-right), has even two
commentaries about the Bertelsmann edition, both somewhat mocking. One of
them said that the ideals of Wikipedia have been betrayed, because Wikipedia
now trusts more to the literary editors of a big business group than to the
Wikipedia contributors, who were not asked whether they want to become
unpaid Bertelsmann collaborators.
But most of the papers were neutral or slightly positive.
By the way, I myself consider to buy a copy for my parents to christmas.
Ziko


A little press review:
Two authors of Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany's most important daily paper,
make a mockery of the Bertelsmann edition.

Netzzeitung


2008/4/22 Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com>:

> 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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>



-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Roomberg 30
NL-7064 BN Silvolde