Wikipedia is apparently a very popular online resource -- and a fairly extensive one ("4,893,476 articles in English" alone, at last count (more by the time you check, no doubt ...)).
Over the years, there have been many attempts -- or stories about attempts -- to publish print editions of Wikipedia:
- A "printed work could be ready from mid-2006", founder Jimmy Wales suggested back in 2005 (apparently the idea was to make it: "available in print for readers in the developing world" ...).
- In 2008 Bertelsmann recognized that printing the whole damn thing was maybe not: "a good project for the German book trade", but they were considering a best-of encyclopaedia: "made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia" (without explaining how they expected to fit 50,000 articles in one volume of 992 pages ...)
- Last year a company tried to crowdfund a full-scale edition; see, for example, Alison Flood on Wikipedia 1,000-volume print edition planned; the project, Printing Wikipedia A to Z doesn't seem to have worked out -- but the company behind it, PediaPress, apparently has gone into the on-demand 'Printed Books from Wiki Content' business ....
Now Michael Mandiberg's exhibit From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! is to open in New York tomorrow -- another attempt, sort of, to print the entire Wikipedia content; Jennifer Schuessler reports on it in The New York Times, in Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves. My favorite part:
Over the years, there have been many attempts -- or stories about attempts -- to publish print editions of Wikipedia:
- A "printed work could be ready from mid-2006", founder Jimmy Wales suggested back in 2005 (apparently the idea was to make it: "available in print for readers in the developing world" ...).
- In 2008 Bertelsmann recognized that printing the whole damn thing was maybe not: "a good project for the German book trade", but they were considering a best-of encyclopaedia: "made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia" (without explaining how they expected to fit 50,000 articles in one volume of 992 pages ...)
- Last year a company tried to crowdfund a full-scale edition; see, for example, Alison Flood on Wikipedia 1,000-volume print edition planned; the project, Printing Wikipedia A to Z doesn't seem to have worked out -- but the company behind it, PediaPress, apparently has gone into the on-demand 'Printed Books from Wiki Content' business ....
Now Michael Mandiberg's exhibit From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! is to open in New York tomorrow -- another attempt, sort of, to print the entire Wikipedia content; Jennifer Schuessler reports on it in The New York Times, in Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves. My favorite part:
First comes the 91-volume table of contents listing the nearly 11.5 million articles.You can actually purchase the volumes (though apparently not all at once -- "The order is so big it breaks the shopping cart", which seems kind of silly) - and I hope someone does.