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

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Out of curiosity, how many pages would it take to package the English Wikipedia? 



----- Original Message ----
From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:03:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Bertelsmann publishes "Wikipedia Encyclopedia in One Volume"

On 23/04/2008, 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.


A well-formed English Wikipedia article - and evidently a German
Wikipedia one too - should have a lead summary section that
constitutes an informative short article in itself, and be written as
an inverted pyramid. The first sentence should be informative and
standalone, the first paragraph should be informative and standalone,
the intro as a unit should be informative and standalone. See
[[:en:WP:LEAD]].

So it's not as good as having the whole thing right there, but it
supplies more information than none for someone who wants the
ten-second summary. A book of those could be quite useful.

And it comes with a free website you can go to for expanded versions
once you know you want one ;-)


- d.

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