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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

I disagree with that. In my opinion, for a general encyclopaedia having
one volume with say 10K one-paragraph articles is much better than 1K
one-page articles. The latter format would be good for a specialized one,
like Encyclopaedia of Music or of Chemistry. But if one really wants to
get a quick idea what the name or the subject he/she has overheard is
about it is much better to have more shorter articles. Additional
information is readily available anyway, in particular, in Wikipedia.

Cheers,
Yaroslav

> One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread is that by
> taking only the introductions (which is indeed necessary to get
> anything close to 50,000 articles into 1000 pages), Bertelsmann in my
> feeling is removing most of the usefulness from Wikipedia. There will
> be articles where that's okay, but there will plenty of articles which
> are excellent in the current form, but become worse-than-trivial if
> reduced to one-paragraph stubs.
>
> I guess for Bertelsmann and for Wikipedia such a book would be ok, but
> a reader would be more served with one volume out of a series of
> books, each of them containing something like 1000 or 2000 complete
> Wikipedia articles on some broad subject.
>
>
> --
> Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
>
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