User:Shanya Almafeta/Citizendium In Print

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

This is just a few ideas I have for raising money. Although it's not a new idea (Wikipedia has its mytical Wikipedia 1.0 project), I think it should be limited. Instead of creating entire almanacs, Citizendium could sell books that are much smaller. The criteria for these books would have to be:

• Targeted (Instead of having a broad range, these books would each have a specific target)
• Smallish (from 64 to 256 paper pages, with larger books possibly being larger)
• Organized (each would be a topic that a specific workgroup could contribute to)
• Not plagarized (no GFDL/Wikipedia content)
• Branded (all would have 'Citizendium' somewhere in the book's title)

The text of a Citizendium page could be converted automagically via macro into a Microsoft Word format. A little hand-editing could find major errors and add in images (with that person ensuring the legality and printability of each one), and the finalized design could then be exported to Adobe Indesign for preparation for print. These could be priced to be affordable for schools and public libraries, but with just enough profit (10-20% of costs, rounded up to the next .95) for Citizendium to support itself at least partially. A new book could come out every six to eight weeks, and updated every 4-8 years or so.

This has the additional ability of focusing effort. If we know 12 months from now we're going to need a certain list of topics to be in top-notch form, and that making these articles the best they can be is going to directly affect Citizendium, we're going to work on them.

With that in mind, here's a few ideas. Each workgroup could come up with its own ideas, natch.

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• Biology Workgroup
  • Citizendium's Book Of Pets (all sorts of articles about animals that are often owned as pets -- Mrs. Sculerati could almost write this one by herself)
• Computers Workgroup
  • Citizendium's Computers Of The Eighties (nostalgia book)
  • Citizendium's Handbook Of Programming Languages (comparison)
• Healing Arts
  • Citizendium's Guide to Alternative Medicine (it's one of our best-growing workgroups, they definately deserve a book)
• History
  • Citizendium's Nation Almanac (all the nations of the world)
• Linguistics
  • Citizendium's Language Reference (comparing various languages)
• Military
  • Citizendium's Guide to World War II (because you know some people will be writing thousands of pages about it anyways)
  • Citizendium's Weapons of War (tanks and fighter jets and carriers and nuclear submarines and so on)
• Music
  • Citizendium's Guide to Pop Music (if the song, band, or singer has been in the top 100 since the 1950s, it gets an article)
• Other Recreation
  • Citizendium's Animé Reference (I might almost write this one by myself ^^; )
• Recreation
  • Citizendium's Great Game Guide (lists of board games, collectable card games, and the like)
• Religion
  • Citizendium's Faiths Of The World (comparing all the major religions)
  • Citizendium's Jesus (we definately have lots to say about the topic ^^; )

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Comments welcome -- but please, put discussions in the forums if possible. I read there regularly, I won't miss it.