Wikipedia comes out as a book

Tuesday January 31st 2006, 12:24 pm
Filed under: Newspapers

German publisher Zendot has announced plans to distribute the German-language print version of the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The amount of information is so large that it is expected to fill 8,000 pages printed in a hundred volumes. Each volume is expected to cost EUR 14 and will be published at the rate of two a month, spread over a release period of four years. Zendot will use 25 workers and 15 editors for the project and an independent scientific adviser will be appointed to examine the content before it reaches a printed form. But observers believe the public contribution nature of the Wikipedia database, where updates and additions occur daily, makes it outdated as a printed version as soon as it comes out. Despite this criticism Zendot has already successfully marketed DVD versions of the website and published several paperback excerpts from the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia recently attracted criticism for the ease in which contributors can add information that is not checked for accuracy. And recent revelations of the addition of copyrighted text have damaged the website’s reputation. (Media Guardian,January 31, 2006)

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.