[WikiEN-l] Print edition

[Delirium]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I've been approached by a major publisher about the possibility of
>working with us to producing and publish a print edition of Wikipedia.
>The concept that they are most interested in at the moment is a single
>large volume, something similar to the Columbia Encyclopedia (a
>desktop encyclopedia, 3200 pages) or Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
>(2067 pages).
>  
>
...

>The question was asked of me, and I ask of the community: can we have
>something like that ready in time?  Or should we shoot for next year?
>  
>

Well, part of that would hinge on what exactly we're going to be doing 
for them.  Are we going to give them wikitext and they're going to 
properly format it and work out the GFDL issues and whatnot?  Or are we 
expected to provide them material in whatever their preferred format is, 
and with all the details worked out?

If the former, it should be doable, but we'd need to get started quickly 
with selecting articles and refining their opening sections to be 
suitable as stand-alone "concise" articles.  With long articles this is 
ideally already the case (a short summary at the beginning), so can be 
edited in-place on Wikipedia, but with medium-length biographies we 
don't usually want to give the 5-sentence summary of their life followed 
by a 15-sentence elaboration, so a fork of the content might be 
necessary there to produce a separate "concise version".

And of course a bunch of coding stuff is needed to handle this gracefully.

-Mark