Printing Wikipedia

Just as I signed on as a member of the WikiProject Germany team the German media giant Bertelsmann announced its plan to print a book with most popular German Wikipedia articles:

The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia published by Bertelsmann will contain summaries of the 25,000 most popular articles. It willl go on sale in September for 19.95 euros, or about $32.

Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, told the Times that the book is intended to appeal to “new target groups, including young people.

Hmm, I wonder why Bertelsmann thinks there will be a market for this.  The great value of Wikipedia is the real time updating and editing of articles, as new information develops or surfaces. Also, the hyperlinks to other Wikipedia articles and other Web resources is invaluable.  All of that is lost in a print version. German Wikipedia has the best reputation among all Wikipedia sites in terms of its accuracy.

Paradoxically, this news comes at the same time that the venerable Brockhaus-Verlag has announced that its popular encyclopedia will henceforth be available only in an online format.

Meanwhile the New York TImes has a list of the 15 most popular German Wikipedia articles over the winter.  Not sure what this says about the user demographics, but Penis (# 5) beat out Vagina (#12) by a wide margin. Probably something for WikiProject Germany to investigate.