[WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0 Paper Plus Extended

Wed Aug 20 21:45:31 UTC 2003

I would personally like to see the capability of creating "custom"
encyclopedias, similar to college books where the teacher of the
particular course can decide which chapters to include and which not
to.

For Example:

"Wikipedia On the Middle Ages" vs "Wikipedia on 20th century Pop
Culture"

I would also remark that "paper" does not have to be actual printed,
in color, glossy, hard-bound with leather and catchy picture. Paper
can be printer-ready work, like that which is commonly available for
large open-source and community projects.

Example:
Documentation for Postgresql database.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/
Click on V7.3 reference guide.

This would be a lot easier to produce than an actual "paper"
encyclopedia, would be available to anyone with a fast printer, would
drastically reduce time-to-market, and would "paper" users to update
particular sections instead of relying on the addendums.

A note on time-to-market: While Herbert's "Dune" and "The Lord of the
Rings" fear not the passage of time, encyclopedias do. I would guess
that few people would pay anything for a 6months+ old encyclopedia.

This would also allow "enterprising folks" (us or them) to make a
quick buck printing and delivering decent "actual paper" books
without involving the Ws (Wikipedia and Wikimedia) into the whole
publiching business, because it can be nasty and is fraught with
potential loss. (ever figured out what one could do with 80,000 extra
copies of the "Lun-Mag" 2004 volume?).

Chris Mahan

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