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

[teun spaans]

Congratulations to everyone involved in this project.

5% royalty is a good rate as B. could theoretically grab the stuff for free
and will probbaly do additional copy-edting.

For the free culture this is an important step as I think this is one of the
first great cooperations with a commercial giant.

That this project will be criticized by some need not surprise or deter you.


I wish you happiness and health

teun spaans


On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com>
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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