CQ2 | Ed Murphy

Wikipedia has a new capability to create books out of articles.  For example, a friend is on a trip this week to the Holy Land.  Based on her itinerary, I created a collection of articles that I thought might be relevant as background for her.

It’s quick and easy to do; you turn on the book creator function and then add links to your book.

There’s an option to export to .pdf, Open Office format (.odt), and even to a physical book publisher for a fee.  My book, which took only a few minutes to create, clocked in at over 500 pages and would have spanned two physical volumes.  I don’t think it’s worth it for the printed version — mine would have cost more than $50 — but for something like a Kindle or a netbook, an easy-to-read .pdf version would be a useful reference to have, I think.

Maybe it’s been there forever but I just realized that Wikipedia has a .pdf generator that creates a nicely templated printable document out of Wikipedia articles.  So, for example, here’s the article on Savonarola., and here’s the link to the .pdf generator (and the output, at least today’s, of that generator, for the truly lazy.)

This goes a long way, I think, to addressing the doubts that rotary dial people still have about Wikipedia.  The presentation layer is very very important and the clean, professional-looking printable version, bristling with scholarly apparatus and legal boilerplate, is effective for a certain kind of reader.  Not everyone, but the beauty is that you can create as many presentation layers as needed; this printable version, like the version on my iPhone, for instance, strips out the discussion and history pages.  Others, looking for semantic links in Wikipedia, will parse and present it in other ways.

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia.  I’ve never been particularly troubled by existential or agency questions about it because it seems to me so self-evidently useful.

Why do people love Manchester United?  I don’t know.  I don’t get it.

Why do people go on pilgrimage?  Dunno.  Adventure, maybe?  Not that interesting of a question to me, really.

Why do people write and edit Wikipedia?  Seems odd.  Wouldn’t have predicted it.  Shrug.  (I do think, however, a rite of passage for Internet literacy is your first Wikipedia edit.  If you haven’t ever done it, please do so now.  I’ll wait.)

In each case, though, you have to acknowledge the importance of sport, of the power of pilgrimage, and the value of Wikipedia.  In case you doubt the last, you can go to to look up pilgrimage or “Compostela” or the phenomenon of Old Trafford on Wikipedia.  That is something that you could not even imagine doing just a few years ago.

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