German Print Version of Wikipedia in the Works
By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 5/7/2008
Wikipedia, the ultimate online resource, is about to go retro. The popular online encyclopedia will publish a print version of its German content.
Why would the German-language content—comprising a total of 739,000 articles—be first into print? Because the publisher will be the German company Bertelsmann, which owns Random House publishing.
But the content for the planned, $32, 992-page book won't be decided by a select group of academics, as happens with most encyclopedias, Instead, popularity, not relevance, will be the criterion, Arne Klempert, spokesman for Wikipedia Germany, told the Associated Press. "The approach of 'Wikipedia in One Volume' is to give the people the information they are looking for," Klempert said.
The online Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 and has now grown to around 10 million articles in 253 languages. The English section has nearly 2,500,000 articles with around 1 billion words.
