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.

Why Freeze A Living Thing?

[gbulmash]

When I was working at IMDb.com [imdb.com] (the Internet Movie Database), I asked Col Needham (the founder and managing director) why they never released it as a book. His answer was that the database was constantly changing. With the lead time you had to give for the actual printing, by the time any book hit the shelves, it would be months out of date.

I think Wikipedia falls victim to the same problem. It might be a very good book and they might select the most stable entries, but like IMDb, Wikipedia is a living, breathing thing that grows and changes on a regular basis. In fact, that's part of its appeal. A book is basically just freezing a snapshot of selected articles in time, but how much does something where part of its value is in its dynamic nature lose from being frozen like that?

- Greg

I may disagree

[adam]

Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I 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. Of course, reading topics on which I am not an expert, I find myself to be generally entertained and educated-- provided that I don't think about the likelihood of errors in those articles. I will grant that the errors usually don't take away from the overall education that a novice would receive.

With a staff editing the articles for content, fixing some of the more glaring errors, and selecting the more stable articles, I think a Wikipedia tome will nicely bridge the gap between meatspace and cyberspace. Keep in mind, not everyone has Internet connection at all times, nor is Wikipedia guaranteed to be functioning 100% of the time.. DNS errors, routing problems, etc.. they all occur. The last couple of years, have begun an interesting transition of merging between various forms of entertainment and education. It's no longer divided into books (paper), tv/radio (static electronic entertainment), and Internet (chatting, web forums, other forms of dynamic entertainment). You have tv shows producing extra content for web playing, you have individual content publishers using youtube and other outlets to publish stuff that would never otherwise have an audience, you have radio shows (NPR, etc) offering podcast downloads, you have paper books also being published electronically (Kindle, Googlebooks, etc), and now you have an electronic encyclopedia almost ironically making the jump to paper edition.

Call me an old fashioned geek, but I like paper, and given the chance, I'd buy a Wikipedia print edition.

I see potential in this as *not* an encyclopedia

[BlueStile]

Rather than publish the X "most popular articles," I think a more fun compilation would be a collection of the most unique, un-Encyclopaedia Brittanica articles on Wikipedia. Things that would never have made it into a real encyclopedia before the web, but that have flourished on Wikipedia. Or, along the same line, anything that showcases it as not just another encyclopedia would be cool. I'm sure there's some other cool ideas out there. (P.S. - My first ever Slashdot post!)

Re:I see potential in this as *not* an encyclopedi

[mistersooreams]

Sounds like you'd probably like Wikipedia's list of unusual articles [wikipedia.org]. A print version of that would be awesome.