Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA: Jimmy Donal Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and co-creator, announced that by January there will be a Wikipedia on DVD. The initiative was introduced by Wikipedia Argentina and Educ.ar which is an online learning resource for children and parents.
The DVD will be distributed in schools in Argentina. This version of Wikipedia will be used by schools that have computers of different generations.
The point to be raised is that there is no information regarding fees. Is this a donation? Bearing in mind that this 'free education idea' is not new I will think so. In the UK, Wikimedia and SOS Children’s launched a Wikipedia DVD, which is distributed free of charge in some schools in England. However, observed that since 2004 Wikipedia CDs and DVDs have been released in Germany. They can be bought in amazon.de; for new software you will be paying around €25. Yet observed that they can be downloaded free of charge.
Now, looking at the payment, I cannot see the transparency of the fees. Wikipedia is free online, so a DVD should be priced according to material costs and taxes. But looking at the price it is sold, I guess that the price reveals more than what I was expecting. So that, I speculate that there are some kind of royalties involved. Certainly, this latte issue may be tricky since Wikipedia has thousands of hundreds of editors.
