[WikiEN-l] Want to publish English version of Wikipedia on DVD and need help/advice

Fri Jan 6 12:24:07 UTC 2006

Thanks for  your response.

Sounds like this could be very difficult. It's hard to imagine "filtering" 
the entire Wikipedia.
I was hoping that the "articles only" version (without comments) would be 
clean and reliable and free of potential copyright problems.
And I would not want to include search software. The basic search 
capabilities within Windows could be used. And, of course, a customer could 
install any other search program as well.  But, ideally, it should be 
possible to simply navigate with links (as one does with the CIA World 
Factbook).

Do you have an email address for Tim Starling?

I was  hoping that there would be a way to convert regularly updated 
Wikipedia files to a format appropriate for DVD, so it would be possible for 
me to offer regular frequent updates.

And is there an email address to officially contact the Foundation?

Thanks again.

Richard

Richard Seltzer, seltzer at samizdat.com, 617-469-2269, http://www.samizdat.com
A library for the price of a book http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
A summary of our book publishing projects 
http://www.samizdat.com/orientation.html

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Gray" <shimgray at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>; <seltzer at samizdat.com>
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 6:55 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Want to publish English version of Wikipedia on DVD 
and need help/advice

On 05/01/06, Richard Seltzer <seltzer at samizdat.com> wrote:

> I understand (thanks to Lars Aronsson) that Directmedia Publishing
> in Berlin (www.directmedia.de) put the German Wikipedia on DVD
> (ISBN 3-86640-001-2).  It sells for $10 on www.amazon.de, and
> $1 of that goes to the German branch of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Euro not dollars, but yeah. Handily, ten euro is almost exactly the
$12 you mention below.

You might be interested to read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia, where Axel Boldt has
given a short explanation of the various .de publishing projects.

It may be worth noting that the German publication wasn't a straight
copy of the "live dump", but rather was a slightly-filtered version -
a largish team had vetted the whole set of articles and then put it on
DVD. I'm not sure what level of quality you're looking at for this
DVD, but without a step like this you'd be leaving a lot of dross (and
a lot of potential copyright problems) in place. They also had some
home-brewed searching software, rather than just a webbrowser, IIRC.

As to producing static HTML versions, I believe Tim Starling was
working on tools to do just this, but I can't offhand find anything.
Searching the archives of this list might be worthwhile.

One final point - you mention donations to Wikimedia. I assume (since
it makes good business sense) you'd want to publicise this, and thus
use the Wikipedia/Wikimedia name - this may well be preaching to the
choir, but please contact the Foundation, to avoid running into
trademark issues and any associated unpleasantness. (I certainly don't
know what the status of using the name was in Germany...)

But all that aside, the donations are of course appreciated :-)

Best of luck,
--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk