The Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership intended to make it possible to obtain high quality print and word processor copies of articles from Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society Institute and the Commonwealth of Learning, and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in Germany. Deployment of the technology will happen in three stages. The first stage, already launched, is a public beta test running on WikiEducator.org of functionality for remixing collections of wiki pages and downloading them in the PDF format. WikiEducator is a project hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning and uses the same wiki technology as Wikipedia.
The second stage, planned for early 2008, will be the deployment of the technology on the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia. At this point, users will also be given the option to order printed copies of wiki content directly from PediaPress.com. The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. The technology developed through this cooperation will be available under an open source license, free for anyone to use for any purpose. It ties into the MediaWiki platform, the open source technology that runs Wikipedia.