I will follow with great interest the print version project. I would
never have expected Wikipedia itself to work as well as it does so I
hope to be pleasantly surprised and that the negativism I am about to
spew will turn out to be utterly misguided. However...
I suspect that producing a print version will magnify many of
Wikipedia's weak points and minimize many of its strong points. One
point about web Wikipedia is that there is no overview, and
consequently the variation in style, quality, and depth of coverage is
not directly obvious. Flipping through a print book will make this much
more apparent.
Another problem is that producing a respectable-looking print version
will, I think, require a high degree of selectivity and quality control
and a fairly rigid approval process by editors who in turn will have to
be approved... and articles frozen after approval. That is, exactly the
opposite of the Wikipedia creation process.
Another problem is that I think that to come up to peoples' expectation
in print versions, a large fraction of the output will have to be
actively edited (for tyops, repeated words words, and to fully
complying with grammatical and language standards). Will people stand
for a mixture of British and American spelling? How many minutes per
article will it take to copyedit to print-Wikipedia standards.
And despite the perfectly clear disclaimer on the every edit page that
explains that you are donating your work, I suspect that some people
who see the work they did for free appear in a bookstore with a price
tag on it will be upset. And I think copyright violations could be a
minefield. Do you think every single one will be caught? Whatever the
theory, I expect that in practice the consequences of a copyright
violation in a print version will be more serious than on the Web. What
if some print encyclopedia company were to act like SCO and assert that
they have found tens of thousands of individual sentences lifted from
their print version by hundreds of contributors (and that they won't
tell anyone which they are?) Even assuming their case is no stronger
than SCOs it could be a substantial nuisance.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at
http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/