German publisher Bertelsmann just released a printed, 992 page version of the German Wikipedia. It will sell for 19.95 Euros, of which 1 Euro will go to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Abbreviated

Of course, the printed version could not include every keyword in the online version of the German Wikipedia, so the publishers restricted themselves to about 50.000 keywords and 1000 illustrations. Overall, the printed version includes about 20.000 articles, which were abbreviated by the editors.

It's important to note that this printed version is not an encyclopedia, but instead a dictionary that is based on the 20.000 most read articles in the German Wikipedia. Most entries are only a few words long. If you wonder about what this book looks like, Google Books already includes a preview of the text and, in keeping with the GPL license, the publisher has made the text available for download.

Why?

The real question, however, is why anybody would want to buy a printed and abbreviated version of Wikipedia. After all, you lose all of the advantages of full-text search and the ability to edit articles in this printed text.

It is worth noting, too, that this is not the first time the German Wikipedia has been published. German publisher Zenodot tried to market a Wikipedia-based encyclopedia in 2005, but the project was cut short because there was simply no demand for it.

The service is very feature rich, but the easiest way to use it is with a javascript bookmarklet. One click of the bookmarklet makes every word on the page you're on clickable for an instant dictionary pop-up. You can add your own definitions right in the same pop-up. For many of the words there are audio pronunciations provided, too.

The company was the subject of a long interview yesterday on the CreativeCommons blog, where co-founder Paul Kastner discusses many of the advanced features such as the ability for website owners to bake Lingro right into their pages automatically. That might be a good fit for ReadWriteWeb, given the international readership we have.

You can also upload whole files from your desktop and have them translated on the fly.

The bookmarklet in action, article continued below.

Lingro also keeps track of web pages you translated and words you looked up on your personal home page. All of that is using cookies, no account creation is required to use the service or add definitions. That's great, the service is really easy to use.

The collaborative dictionary builder gives anyone an opportunity to enter definitions of unsolved words in a variety of languages. Know what the words rapporteur, harmonise or feedingstuffs mean? Lingro users could use your help!

Kastner explained how the dictionary builder works and the basic philosophy of the project in the following paragraph from the CC interview:

Once someone has chosen a language pair they're fluent in, the builder shows them a list of words missing from that particular dictionary, ordered by how common they are in the language (the word "the" would be near the top, while "onomatopoeia" is further down). They can also see sentences showing the words used in context to help recall the meanings. These are the same kinds of tools used by the big publishers to create their dictionaries - we're not just opening up the dictionaries themselves, we're opening the entire process of creating them.