How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100 edit
The economics of Wikipedia edit
I bought Wikipedia last week. Well, in fact I only bought volume 147 of the German print version of Wikipedia. Volume 147 started with the article on 'Anarchismus in den Niederlanden' and ended with the article on 'Anatopia'. Lo and behold: it was not the complete German language version of Wikipedia that was printed, and it was the “frozen” 2016 version – without images. This volume of over 700 pages cost me EUR 87,03 – including postage and taxes. Foolish, of course: the information was (1) outdated at the moment I bought this volume, (2) incomplete, as the volume lacks images and references (!) and (3) the paper version doesn’t have all the extra’s that an online version has: no working links to related articles, no possibility of zooming in, no switching to other language versions. But then, I like to do foolish things.
PrintWikipedia edit
A printed version of Wikipedia is nonsense, of course, as Wikipedia holds the history of all articles. Well, 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 edit
We were lucky: Mandiberg, helped by the Lulu company, didn't print the complete Wikipedia. In New York he used 106 printed volumes to make his case - 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 German language version). If you want to buy a volume, print-on-demand technology will still cater you. If you only want to see how Print Wikipedia looks anno 2023, you have to go to Eindhoven (in the Netherlands) and visit the current exhibition (up till March 2023) in the futuristic building Evoluon. The Dutch language Wikipedia can be seen in print in 68 books of 700 pages each.
Other books on the basis of Wikipedia articles edit
The worst is yet to come. Books LLC in Memphis was a company that was selling books, compiled from a category of articles from Wikipedia. Mind you: in 2009 Books LLC were selling 224,000 titles. I guess they ran out of business somewhere around 2017. One of their last books published was Graffiti in the United States (2013), ISBN 9781233100187. Earlier Books LLC published were books like Dam disasters (2011), ISBN 9781156436356 and 20th-century national presidents in Africa (2010), ISBN 978-1-15-597499-6. Fifty Wikipedia articles glued together in one volume, for sale at $32. No kidding - see photo. (coming)
Wikipedia is not for sale edit
Back to where we started: the economics of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not for sale. There are three reasons for that. Most important reason is that the capital of Wikipedia is its community. People in the Wiki community write the articles, add the photos and edit the encyclopedia. We are not for sale, and will not work under a different set-up. Second point that will hinder any attempt to sale Wikipedia is the license. Creative Commons has a few disadvantages, but one nice thing about the CC license is that in theory we could just pick up the content and continue elsewhere. But then: this only helps if one is supported by a large community that can help build the house further. Third reason is the business structure of Wikipedia. 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.