How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100

Serendipity

How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100

I bought Wikipedia last week. Well, in fact, I only bought volume 147 of the German print version of Wikipedia, which started with the article on 'Anarchismus in den Niederlanden [de]' and ended with the article on 'Anatopia [de]'. As it happens, it wasn't even the complete German language version of Wikipedia that was printed, as it was missing images and even recent references – and it was the 2016 version. This volume of over 700 pages cost me EUR 87.03, including postage and taxes. Foolish, of course: the information was, first of all, already outdated at the moment I bought this volume. Secondly, it was incomplete, given the lack of images and recent text and references, and overall, the paper version doesn’t have all the extras that an online version has (like working hyperlinks, searching, zooming in, and switching to other language versions). But then again, I like to do foolish things.

PrintWikipedia

A printed version of Wikipedia is nonsense, of course, as Wikipedia holds not just the current version, but the history of all its articles. Well, is it nonsense? Some call it art, or use it to show the size of all human knowledge. The exhibitions of Michael Mandiberg in New York (2015), Berlin (2016), Ghent and Belgium (2018) were clearly intended to help understand the true size of Wikipedia, or in the artist's words "both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data".^[1]

Not a complete print

We were lucky: Mandiberg, helped by the Lulu company, didn't print the complete Wikipedia. In New York he made his case with 106 printed volumes out of the 7,473 volumes that would have been needed to print the complete English language version of Wikipedia in 2015. In Berlin dozens of volumes were displayed (out of the needed 3,406 for the full German language version). If you want to buy a volume, print-on-demand technology will still cater to you. If you want to see how a print Wikipedia looks in 2023, you have to go to Eindhoven (in the Netherlands) and visit the current exhibition (open till March 2023) in the futuristic building Evoluon, where the Dutch language Wikipedia can be seen printed in 68 books of 700 pages each.

Other books on the basis of Wikipedia articles

A collection of Wikipedia articles (2010)

It gets far wackier than art exhibits, though: Books LLC, in Memphis, was a company that sold books compiled from a category of articles from Wikipedia. In 2009, they had some 224,000 titles for sale, but it looks like they went defunct some time around 2017. One of the last volumes they published was Graffiti in the United States (2013), ISBN 9781233100187. Earlier publications included such titles as Dam disasters (2011) ISBN 9781156436356 and 20th-century national presidents in Africa (2010), ISBN 978-1-15-597499-6, the latter of which consisted of fifty Wikipedia articles glued together in one volume, for sale at $32. No kidding: see the photo.

Wikipedia is not for sale

Back to where we started: the economics of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not for sale, for several reasons. The most important reason is that the capital of Wikipedia is its community. Members of our community write the text, create the images, and edit the encyclopedia. The articles may be licensed under Creative Commons, but the users are not. One nice thing about our licensing arrangement is that, in theory, we could just pick up the content and continue elsewhere (although this still requires the support of a large community that can help build the house further). The Wikimedia Foundation owns the servers on which the different language versions run, but the Foundation doesn't own the content. Indeed, Wikipedia as a concept looks like something so odd it can never work in practice. That's why it does.

References

^ Daniel Culpan: 'Art exhibit proves it's impossible to print all of Wikipedia'. In: Wired, 19 June 2015

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16 January 2023 (all comments)

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This is another (urls are black listed) Kickstarter.com /projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game-museum neat commercial project , that makes use (and provided) freely licensed images from Common about History of video games by c:User:Evan-Amos. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 13:01, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reminds me of this. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

- And Diderot's Encyclopédie, which modestly aimed to encapsulate all knowledge in a shelf of printed volumes, unfortunately running up against the rapid increase in technology of the industrial revolution... it got to 28 volumes (or 35, depending on what you choose to include) before the team gave up the struggle ... Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One major, concerning issue that this raises tangentially, is how we go about preserving history with digital content when it is easier to modify and change it according to the political climate? Our featured article on Ronald Reagan is a great example of this problem, as it reads like a hagiography written by conservative activists who present a highly selective and biased POV of the former president by moving all of the negative material to sub-articles that receive less attention than the primary subject. Print books, which aren’t subject to change as much, often highlight such negative material in the initial TOC, giving it added visibility. Aside from this glaring example of bias on Wikipedia, how do we prevent our articles from deteriorating over time due to bad actors? I would like to suggest that the increasing use of automated tools should be funded and employed to preserve the accuracy and authenticity of digital content for the future. It’s generally well known that bad actors will seek positions of authority within any online administration to try and promote their bias from within. On Reddit, this is a huge problem with subs, which are often moderated by bad actors opposed to the content of the sub, or even more harmful, actively filter content that goes against their chosen narrative. Sites like the Internet Archive act as a major bulwark against historical revisionism. In the US, we saw up close and personal how the Trump administration attempted to delete the concept of climate change from two major websites and filter out the word "carbon". The threat of all of featured content turning into biased Reagan hagiographies is real and omnipresent without more oversight. It may very well be the case that history can be preserved simply by printing out a newer, more accurate version of Wikipedia that is examined for historical inaccuracy and omissions by an AI of some kind. Recently, Matthew G. Devost spoke about his experience at DEF CON seeing automated hacking tools in action, while historian Timothy Snyder discussed the Russian fascination with changing the history of the past. It’s not a stretch to see how the two could come together to change Wikipedia pages and change the history of the past in subtle, unique ways. As a deterrent and a defensive strategy, Wikipedia should use more automated tools to detect and prevent this kind of information warfare in the first place. It’s coming, whether we like it or not, so it’s best to prepare. Given how countries keep backsliding into authoritarianism, and as democracy declines around the world during a new Dark Ages, print editions of Wikipedia may end up saving humanity from itself. Sadly, we cannot depend on digital content to record and preserve history from those who would use it against us. Viriditas (talk) 01:38, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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