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.

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.

Agency is a little more complicated; I still don’t care why people write and edit Wikipedia but I end up in plenty of conversations about Wikipedia’s supposed lack of authority and various biases.  I think there’s bias everywhere and I don’t know exactly what the best authority for an encyclopedia ought to be.  (For instance, I know a lot of academics — I’m married to one — and I can assure you that they are not necessarily a storehouse of factual authority.)  I’m quite content to read an article like, say, Burma in World War II, without knowing the details of the authors.

But this credibility is undermined by one sort of authorial bias; the articles unsurprisingly reflect the writers and the writers, apparently, really like things like science fiction and programming languages.  You can profitably compare, for instance, the entries on Earth-One (some DC comics paranoid reader term) and Value Proposition (a very widely used if silly business term.)  The latter is perfunctory, listless, while the sci fi entry is brimming with authority and telling detail.  (It’s still not going to get him laid, though.)

More on the issue of agency; via Silicon Alley Insider, an interesting article by Aaron Swartz asking “Who Writes Wikipedia?”

Potential answers:

(1)  Everyone writes Wikipedia.  It’s crowdsourced social knowledge or whatever the latest thing is.  A hundred million monkeys write it.  We all do.  It’s the wisdom of the audience.  This is the common view, and the source of much doubt about its reliability.

(2)  The Five Hundred write Wikipedia.  A small self-selected elite write Wikipedia and everyone else just reads it.  Sometimes the number is a thousand, sometimes 1,600.  But it resembles a normal, large, organization although the elite is unpaid.  This is Jimmy Wales’s view.

(3)  Swartz, though, has done some basic analysis of edit data and has a theory:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.