A version of the German section of Wikipedia will be published in print. Media conglomerate Bertelsmann (which owns Random House and music venture Sony BMG) has said that it plans to publish the trimmed-down German content on the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.

Reports vary regarding the actual number of articles which will make it into the print version. The German Wikipedia is the second-largest section of the online reference site after the English one, with 739,000 articles. AFP says that about 50,000 of them, apparently the most popular, will make it into print. Other reports put the number of articles to only half this amount.

Director at Bertelsmann Lexicon, Beate Varnhorn, has said that the abridged, one-volume print edition targets groups which may get to know the Wikipedia project in this unconventional (or, better said, conventional) way and maybe take part in it.

The book will be priced at 19.95 euros ($32), with one euro from every copy sold going to the German chapter of Wikimedia Deutschland, the organization behind the German Wikipedia. It's easy to picture that the print version cannot comprise all the content from the online version. It appears that only 15-line (or 10-line according to other reports) abbreviated summaries of each topic will be printed.

Furthermore, all entries will be fact-checked. The tome will have around 1,000 pages.

The online Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has now grown to around 10 million articles in 253 languages. The English section has nearly 2,500,000 articles with around 1 billion words.