User:Arvindn/Paper version

This page outlines my proposal for a paper version of wikipedia.

There are two main possibilities for a paper version: a collection of brilliant prose, and a collection of articles on one narrow subject. Both are good, but I prefer the latter. Many proposals have been made, but AFAIK, none acted upon. I hope that by presenting my idea in fine detail I'm increasing the chances that it will be implemented.

Step 1

Everyone goes to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest and indicates, for each field they are interested in:

1. Their expertise in that field (eg. masters/job experience etc.)
2. Whether they would be interested in a paper version in that subject.

1) is more generally useful. For example, one of the only remaining reasons people hesistate to use/contribute to wikipedia is that they doubt the reliability of information since anyone can edit any article. Wikipedians, however, have a different experience: self-selection works extremely well. Since almost everyone is an expert in something or the other, and people generally stick to working on topics they are most familiar with, it follows that most articles are in fact written by experts.

So if every wikipedian did 1), we it would give us a very powerful tool: we would be able to point the press/skeptics to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest and say: "look, we have so many Ph.Ds and so many professionals contributing to practially every topic under the sun, and that's how we're able to produce kick-ass accurate timely articles in huge quantity".

But we are more interested in 1) in the context of 2). If everyone did 1) and 2), then when someone thinks doing a paper wikipedia on subject X is a good idea, and they find that a sufficient number (20 should be a lower bound IMHO) of wikipedians have expressed interest in subject X, the following happens:

highly incomplete, will continue tomorrow

Step 2

The interested wikipedians announce their project and begin with List of X related articles a starting point. The list is, or will become, the list of articles that will be included in the paper version.

For each article in the list, someone proposes a version of the article for inclusion in the paper WP. This would generally be the current revision, but it could be anything in the history; this would be useful in cases like there's an ongoing edit war etc.

...