How do you print "WikiLove" in Italian?

<< Wikipedia books are like star constellations in a universe of knowledge. >>  – pediapress

A few years ago, when the Extension:Collection was first launched, I was quite critical about it. The one with PediaPress was among the very first partnerships signed by WMF, and I recall writing worried blogposts about this trend.  Since then, my views have changed.

Recently, we have all read about Amazon.com selling more e-books than print books, so it might seem ill-timed... but this year I decided to give the "Wikipedia Books" feature the attention it really deserves on my home wiki, it.wp.  In 2011, Wikipedia turned 10 - I think it also went "physical" : more than ever before people around the world gathered for parties, talks, meetups and so on, allowing our online projects to enter newspapers, classrooms, cultural institutions, in many cases for the very first time.

In a moment of optimism, I asked PediaPress, as the official WMF partner for printing contents from our projects, if they were interested in a reprise of the coupon giveaway they launched last year on en.wp.  I could not believe my eyes when I read their enthusiastic reply, some weeks ago!

...So now we have a Wikipedia Books project scheduled for this June.   This will enable us to showcase our best contents, both featured articles and the "quality articles" which it.wiki has recently adopted... to get a free copy of our favourite collection of articles... and above all, to get together to do something useful and funny for Wikilove's sake.


guest post by: elitre

Elegant visual snapshots of expanses of knowledge

The ideal of beautiful print editions of article collections has inspired generations of Wikipedians, like centuries of encyclopedists before them.

German Wikipedia enthusiasts first took single topics and made WikiReaders out of them, finding a national publishing house willing to bind and distribute the results under the "WikiPress" label. They even considered printing a keywords and short descriptions for the entire encyclopedia, though that did not come to fruition.

Then in 2008, Håkon Lie (the original proposer of CSS, and a font and layout geek) spent time making his Prince XML tool generate beautiful PDFs out of Wikipedia pages. He has also dreamed of printing summaries of all Wikipedia articles in the style and layout of a traditional encyclopedia, and has joined our offline-wp mailing list.

PrinceXML's layout of the Norway article

And today Stefan Kuhn shared his latest script, called simply "The Book", which generates a multi-column view of a set of articles, with thumbnails and a bit of text. Like the short well-attributed summaries produced by Magnus's tool that I reviewed earlier, these efforts all try to convey the beauty and detail of a large work in a simple package.

The Book: Kinosch – Kirk Hammett from the Luxembourgish Wikipedia

What are your favorite print layouts for dense knowledge? What variations on the "Wikipedia 1.0" and printed Wikipedia theme would you like to see come to pass?