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

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Andre Engels" <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

If enough (potential) readers share your view, Bertelsmann
will incur a loss and perhaps some of their competitors will
take the opportunity.

  The nice part of this deal is that unless you are a
stockholder of Bertelsmann you do not have to worry about
any of this.

Tim