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).
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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