[Doom1]

Wikipedia is crawling off the web and onto a printed page near you, at least if you happen to live in Germany. Media conglomerate Bertelsmann (which owns Random House, among other things) has announced plans to put out a stripped-down offline version of the German Wikipedia later this year with the goal of appealing to "new target groups, including young people."


Publishing the complete content of Wikipedia in paper would seem a strange decision; after all, this means that the key advantages of the online version are lost (hyperlinks, search) and the cornerstone of the project (editing) is unavailable. Well, you could mark up your paper copy, we suppose, but if it's only going to be read by guests who use your bathroom, this is an exercise in publishing to a limited audience.
But the complete Wikipedia won't even be printed. While the German version of the site has three-quarters of a million entries, only a few will be printed (the New York Times seems to think 25,000 entries will end up in the book, while the AFP suggests that it's 50,000). But wait, there's more! These won't even be the full entries, just 15-line abbreviated summaries of each topic.


If your mind hasn't been blown yet, consider again the "young people" comment made by Beate Varnhorn of Bertelsmann to the Times. This sounds like the last group of people who would purchase a €20, thousand-page collection of 15-line summaries from a freely-available Internet encyclopedia, but hey, that's just us. More power to Bertlesmann if they can move the books.
The best news about the entire project is that Bertelsmann will give €1 to Wikimedia Deutschland for each copy of the book sold. The bad news is that the articles to be included in the book will be the most popular on the site, not the most important, meaning that the new volume should be heavy on Jetsons trivia and penises.






http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-near-you.html