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Wikipedia Planning a DVD Version
daria42 writes "The Wikipedia Foundation hopes to sell an English version of Wikipedia on CD-ROM and DVD before the end of the year. A boxed set of the German language version of Wikipedia has been available since last year. An updated version of the German Wikipedia was launched on Amazon.de this week, and the e-commerce site has received 8,000 pre-orders, according to Wikipedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales. Wales said it was easier to put the German version of Wikipedia onto CD as there are significantly less pages than there are for the English language version. He said that English Wikipedia would 'barely fit on 2 DVDs.'"
...no images in the dump. Just text. And not reader software.
Also, the current dump is about 800 MG, gzipped. enjoy.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
A lot of vandals copy/paste text from copyrighted websites onto Wikipedia, usually they get found and deleted but some are missed. If they sell copies of Wikipedia then they are going to get tons of copyright infringement lawsuits.
Wikipedia's servers are often overloaded. My net connection can go offline somtimes. It's 100% positivly available for a research paper, and will 100% be around to back you up. You can run complex searches on an offline version much better/nicer/faster than an online version (if you can run it online at all). You can show it off to friends. Or a multitude of other reasons.
Omnes stulti sunt.
Have a read.
Want to learn random stuff for free?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
Text content contributed to Wikipedia must be GFDL, so the foundation can sell it as long as they respect the authors' copyright and the terms of the license. Although the Wikimedia Foundation is not-for-profit, even commercial distribution would have been acceptable under the terms of the GFDL. But the content copyrights still belong to those who created it.
On the other hand, it happens that people contribute material copyrighted by other people, without their consent. According to U.S. law, Wikipedia cannot be held responsible for that, as long as they act quickly to remove infringing material. When physical media is distributed, that protection is no longer valid.
It's hard to get a more friendly distribution method than that!
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
well, we just hate redundant information :D
There is no way to turn AndbecauseGermansdonotwastebytesonspaces into one single German word btw.
It is true that the German language allows combinations of nouns of arbitrary length, but in the English language constructs like this exist as well (e.g. railway consists of two nouns). The only difference is that those speaking English are not free to make up new ones.
And as a general rule of thumb most combinations in English are limited to two words. While it wouldn't make sense to combine more than 5 words, because it would get to hard to read and understand the term, there are rare examples in German which consist of 3 or even 4 words.
I don't read replies by ACs.
I first heard about this back in July of 2004. The people at Mandrake had already approached some of our people, and told us they wanted to put Wikipedia on DVD. The stumbling block was, of course, copyright issues. We launched a copyright tagging project in August - basically, they did an sql dump of the list of all uploaded files that had no copyright tag and tagged them. In January, Angela sent them an email, telling them it was done, and that's when the DVD project actually started.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You could if you studied it for a minute. The rules are actually relatively simples. For example, let's look at everyone's favorite word: "Aktiengesellschaft", meaning a public corporation, and usually abbreviated "AG".
Semantically, it can be broken into Aktien / Gesell / -schaft; taken at this decomposed level it means something a little bit like "stock fellowship".
Orthographically, well, you're in luck; as usual (always?), it breaks down along the same lines, according to the rules. What are the rules? I couldn't tell you exactly, but they're simple, and they're similar to Latin's. Anyway, it breaks down to Ak/tien/ge/sell/schaft. Breaks occur between consonants that don't form clusters, between vowels that don't form diphthongs, and otherwise before consonants.
And for those who care...
An MLA/APA auto formatter for references.
Every teacher at my school has recommended it to me. (Although I myself have not yet gotten a chance to try it.)
Althought I think actually USING the DVD set for normal use when you have broadband kinda defeats the purpose, I can think of a few reasons why it could be a good thing.
A) Archival. Average users will be able to get a working, usable snapshot of Wikipedia, with media.
B) Preservation. If Wikipedia were to shut down, you'd have a copy of it.
C) Faster access. If you have a slow connection, you can still access Wikipedia at fast speeds. This benefit dwindles over time as articles are updated.
D) Offline access. If you're on the road with no net connection, you can still access Wikipedia. This benefit also dwindles over time as articles are updated.
E) Although backed by Google now which helps with the financials, if it brings in some cash to help support itself it's likely to stay around for much longer.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You can see my work so far at the following links:
..and of course, my beautiful anti-alias fonts for Plucker, made with PalmFontConv by Alexander Pruss.
I've also converted the Creating XPCOM Components book by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger to Plucker format as well as the FreeBSD Handbook.
I have literally hundreds of similar-quality works I'll be releasing over the next few months to the community on an ongoing basis.
If there's something you'd like to see, just let me know
This is about the Wikimedia Foundation , not Wikipedia Foundation which doesn't exist. /. post are wrong.
Both the article and the