German Wikipedia To Be Published As a Book

David Gerard writes "Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. It will cost 20 Euros, and 1 Euro from each copy will go to Wikimedia. They're editing down the most popular 50,000 articles for the 1,000-page book, to be released in September. Because of the open-source origin of the material, the publisher cannot claim copyright in the book." The German-language Wikipedia is second in size only to the English version, which has 2.3 million articles.

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[harmonica]

Obviously, this book isn't for those with net access everywhere from their work place to their living room couch. There are still a lot of people without any net access, for that matter. This book with its emphasis on popular topics which may not be covered in your other tree-based encyclopedias could be useful for all those without access to that living thing. After two or three years, at the price of 20 Euros, people can get the new edition of the book to catch up.

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[eldavojohn]

Wikipedia is a living, breathing thing that grows and changes on a regular basis.

Uh, it also requires an internet connection. I'm lucky enough to live in an area where we have electricity always and internet 99% of the time.

Apparently they think that people in Germany would like to have a hard copy. I'm certain my grandparents (who read tons but do not have a computer) would be interested in a $40-50 edition of this book.

Or even, you know, the local library.

There's a reason we put things into hard copy. It's so that we always have them. Might be a waste of trees, also might be a great idea if the world has an unfortunate energy crisis looming ...

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[Chris Burke]

I see your point, but on the other hand, new movies are always being created and thus the filmographies of all the people involved are constantly changing. Unless you restricted the print-form to solely those entries of actors etc. who had passed on and made it essentially a film history book, you're necessarily putting a short window on its relevance.

Whereas with Wikipedia, while further edits are certainly possible, there's nothing actually new happening wrt say the Expressionist Movement, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Juniper Bushes. If the article as it stands is good and essentially complete, then it isn't inherently a bad idea to capture it and put it in a fixed format. There may be further edits that improve the article, but that's not so different than a future edition of a print encyclopedia, and in fact if the print version takes off then there would almost certainly be such.

So while it is true that making a print version of Wikipedia loses some of the inherent appeal of the WP, it also makes a lot more sense than a print version of IMDB, and could actually be a useful and cheaper alternative to other print encyclopedias which never had that dynamism to begin with.

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[siriuskase]

No reason to worry. Wikipedia will continue to live and breath, just as your cat, child, or spouse continue to live and breath when you take a snapshot of them. A snapshot might not be completely up to date, but it can be much more convenient than having your cat, child, or spouse on your desk or in your pocket everyday.

Fifty articles on each page?

[Mr2001]

How on earth is that going to work, cramming 50,000 articles into 1000 pages? They could edit each article down to a single paragraph and you'd still need a magnifying glass to read it.

Re:I may disagree

[Chris Burke]

Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there.

That's a good thing. The fact that WP's nature makes you inherently suspicious means that you have the correct mentality when reading it, as opposed to say Britannica which naturally tends to have an air of authority about it when in reality you should be equally suspicious of what you read there.

Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors.

How many of them would seriously damage the understanding of a layman browsing the subject? As in, they're not trying to actually put what they read into practice, but are trying to gain a general and basic knowledge set?

I remember reading through aforementioned Britannica when I had a copy in my parents' home years ago, and finding quite a few errors in the computer-related articles. But like a lot of the errors I find on WP, they're mostly factual errors of some minutia which while clearly false wouldn't actually matter much unless you were for some reason depending on them to re-create what the article is talking about.

Which you should never do, whether it's WP or EB.

you want money for

[textstring]

wikipedia w/o hyperlinks? no thanks. or does it come with a box of bookmarks?

Re:Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[turing_m]

"Might be a waste of trees, also might be a great idea if the world has an unfortunate energy crisis looming ..."

Is it that expensive (in energy terms) to manufacture most of the means of storage such as HDD and flash? Even so, the energy involved with producing a library of congress versus storing one on HDD would be in favor of the HDD.

The methods of reading are getting smaller (read: use less energy in the manufacturing) and less power intensive to run. At the moment, the only problem with the miserly power consuming PCs is putting up with slower speed. That will change over the next ten years as technology improves.

Not to say that paper isn't useful. Barring fire and bugs, failure is fairly graceful and very slow as opposed to digital. But I'd be surprised if the energy crisis caused us to dispense entirely with digital.

Re:I may disagree

[Lapsarian]

I sincerely hope that when you read topics upon which you are an expert and find they contain flaws you edit them accordingly.

Re:Citing

[wvmarle]

OK getting off-topic here.

A moderator should not care about the karma of the author. If a post is funny, mod it funny. That's what it is. And whether the poster gets karma or not that's not up to the moderator to decide.

Math must be in error

[duh P3rf3ss3r]

Editors will distil 50,000 of the most popular entries in the German version of Wikipedia into the 1,000-page volume to go on sale in September.

How in the world do they intend to fit 50'000 articles into a 1'000 page book? 50 articles per page -- what is that -- like one line per article?

A good thing

[schoschie]

It's a good thing for Wikipedia. A lot of people are media-conservative in the sense that they don't take Web content seriously, particulary an encyclopaedia that is written by volunteers. Example: I wanted to prove a point to my dad a while ago using a Wikipedia article, and his reply was essentially "that article has no value and cannot be trusted as it was written by people hanging around on the Web". A printed book made by a real, large and well-known publisher might change this attitude, especially of those people who think Web content is worth less than printed content.

Also, I'd expect it to push Wikipedia contributions and the overall article quality. If people may expect to see their work in a printed book hopefully sold in large numbers, it will motivate them to contribute higher-quality content to Wikipedia. You can go to a book store and tell your friend: hey, look, I wrote some of the stuff in this article!

On the downside, I agree with those who wonder how they will fit 50K articles into a 1000 page book. 50 articles per page will mean one short paragraph per article on average. It's not possible to represent the nature of Wikipedia content in a space that small. Most articles will have to be edited down to the kind of content you would expect in any conventional (printed) encyclopaedia.

Also, I wonder how much Bertelsmann will benefit from this deal. 1 EUR per book for Wikimedia is not exactly generous. On the other hand, we can expect to see this book prominently on display in most every book store. If they sell 100K copies, Wikimedia will get 100K EUR, which means a lot to them.

Re:I may disagree

[owlnation]

I sincerely hope that when you read topics upon which you are an expert and find they contain flaws you edit them accordingly.

Oh, nice Utopian theory. In practice it's not so simple. What if you are an expert on something a cabal is protecting? Or something an admin wrote? Until Wikipedia removes the admins and distances itself from Jimmy Wales, there's always going to be problems with the Truth.

For example: Wikipedia just got a sizable grant from a Foundation. On the board of that foundation sits people from General Motors. Let's say you have expert knowledge and cited proof of problems with GM cars. What do you honestly think your changes of getting that info correctly on Wikipedia are?

Re:I may disagree

[David Gerard]

Check out the SOS Children [soschildre...ges.org.uk] DVD distro. They checked it over for use in their own schools.

If you keep in mind how Wikipedia is written and that the website is a live working draft - like running CVS HEAD - you'll be fine. But of course many readers want to be able not to think when reading. (I bet they have fun on teh intarweb.)

Re:Citing

[grm_wnr]

Omg how clever. That is in fact what you should always be doing, even with Britannica. I'm amazed that they don't teach this very basic method in universities these days.