In late 2003, Jimmy Walesproposed making an offline release version of Wikipedia. This group was formed in late 2004 to meet this challenge. Our work involves identifying and organizing articles, and improving/maintaining a core set. Our work does not hinder the existing wiki process for creating and editing articles, but rather it supports that work by providing additional organization.
You are encouraged to join us and help out with one of the projects, or to discuss Wikipedia 1.0 on the talk page. A significant part of our work centers around maintaining the assessment scheme, which is now used on more than two million articles by over 1800 WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia. It is also being used on other language projects. Generally work on this team is sporadic - periods of hectic activity followed by long periods of waiting! Often work is long and tedious - checking through a list of 22,000 instances of profanities one by one, organizing 10,000 keywords taken from category names, or dealing with technical bugs when the assessment bot fails for no apparent reason. However, it's all worth it in the end.
Our strategy has been intensely debated, but the group has reached a consensus. We elected not to follow the German model. Instead we chose to start with a core of quality articles on key subjects and expand from there. We have produced two test versions (Version 0.5 and Version 0.7), with the goal of releasing better collections of articles in due course. The next general release is generically referred to as "Release Version" while our first "official" comprehensive release will be called Version 1.0. As of December 2010, we are currently working on Version 0.8.
Current needs
Although we have much of our needed system automated, there are still some tasks needing work:
Preparation of a reliable index. If you can write code and you're interested in how to map category trees into a useful index (not as easy as it sounds!) please contact Walkerma.
Reviewing manual nominations. Whenever there is a new release being planned, we need volunteers to review a few articles and process them.
Propose useful "guide" pages to be added, such as lists, disambiguation pages, etc.
Check for vandalism in the selected versionIDs of the articles.
Develop nice pages for navigation through the content, such as subject portals.
Test reader software and find/report bugs.
Help with distribution, especially in remote areas without internet access.
Please let us know if you can help with any of these.
Wikipedia Version 0.5
Status
We are now mainly using bot-assisted selection based on assessment by WikiProjects and importance rankings. We are also developing a method to automate version selection using WikiTrust, to ensure that vandalism does not end up in our offline releases; we may also use Flagged Revisions once established.
As of March 2010, over 2,200,000 articles have been assessed for the project by over 1000 WikiProjects. This work has begun to spread to other language Wikipedias. More...
Now that lists of articles are easily available for many WikiProjects, the Work via WikiProjects is switching to a new area of work, in collaboration with WP:COUNCIL. The group will now focus on identifying, tagging and assessing important articles that lack WikiProject oversight, while continuing with its role of facilitating the introduction of assessment into new areas.
Create an article selection of the most important and high quality articles, using automation to expedite the process. Articles are selected using the 1.0 bot (based on the 1.0 assessment scheme) and it is hoped that article version ("revisionID") selection can be based on an algorithm of the WikiTrust project.
The next release, Version 0.8, uses bot-assisted article selection, with manual adjustments based on feedback from WikiProjects. Used as a test of the WikiTrust revisionID selection code - this worked well. Now available for download.
BozMo's group has already released two versions, with 2000 and 4000+ articles respectively, with content filtered/selected for use by children (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection). The 2008 selection was released in autumn 2008.
Organise and facilitate compilation of article lists from the WikiProjects and seek to identify important topics within each WikiProject's area of expertise. Locate important topics that are currently not being managed by projects. In conjunction with WP:COUNCIL, the project serves as a link with the editing community, and may later help locate expert reviewers.
Improve a set of around 160 articles on top-level subjects, plus around 200 high level articles in a supplement, through a COTF and other collaborations. Once these reach a publishable standard, a further set of key topics will be assessed and brought up to standard.
A test release designed to pave the way for Version 1.0. Used manual nominations and approval based on importance and quality. Approval was by only one person, from the review team.
A test release of automated article selections, prior to release of Version 1.0 above.
Early 2010
A test release designed to pave the way for Version 1.0. Used SelectionBot to make an article selection based on importance and quality. Vandalism prevention used a script, with manual checks, which delayed the release significantly. [២]
Authoritative Editions — (other names welcome :-) aims to give experts in each field the tools to review articles in their area of expertise and give their okay particular revisions as meeting their standard of judgement.
Allow editors to propose new groups. Ex: "Featured Article review" or "American Physical Society peer review".
Each blessing group would have a set of review guidelines.
Each blessing group would consist of this set of guidelines, and a set of users who could "bless" a revision of an article as satisfying them.
Articles with blessed revisions would display icons or links to last-blessed revisions.
Featured Articles First — now reviewing older or problem FAs to ensure that quality is maintained, ready for inclusion of these articles in Wikipedia 1.0.
Geography project — proposes to produce essentially a descriptive gazetteer of the world for publication. This could include an atlas, continents, countries and major cities. This would serve as a test bed for publishing Wikipedia 1.0, but could also be a valuable stand-alone product.
Three Level Editing — lets all users participate in a three part editing process to assure that pages are up to quality standards. The first level is just a general check, the second level is a factual check, and the third level is a last "just in case" check. This process would assure that articles would be up to standards without putting too much responsibility on one user.
Dynamic Pocket Cyclopedia Lists most important FAs, FLs, and GAs. An evolving list of no more than half of Wikipedia’s most important featured articles, featured lists, and designated good articles.
WikiSort Integrate the sifting process into the Wiki. Aims to use data from the planned user rating scheme to provide rankings of articles, such that important quality articles can be automatically identified for inclusion in Wikipedia 1.0. This project has been rendered obsolete by WikiProject-based assessments (see above).
Article assessment This project has been rendered obsolete by WikiProject-based assessments (see above).
Stages to publication
The general process for producing an offline release
On the English Wikipedia, we use the Selection Bot as part of the selection process, using the WikiProject assessments to indicate the state of each article. The online version is held on the Kiwix server while undergoing cleanup. The offline format we use is ZIM format, and the conversion is performed by User:Kelson. Currently Linterweb, a French software company, is publishing our material.
Statistics
The WP 1.0 bot tracks assessment data (article quality and importance data for individual WikiProjects) assigned via talk page banners. If you would like to add a new WikiProject to the bot's list, please read the instructions at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot.
The global summary table below is computed by taking the highest quality and importance rating for each assessed article in the main namespace.
Wikipedia:Books & meta:WikiReader - Wikipedia books are collections of articles from Wikipedia on a certain topic, in the form of PDFs published for download and intended to be printed, and also to be sold in printed form.
The Book Tool, and Wiki to print, a collaboration between the Foundation and OSI/PediaPress.