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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.'"
Frequent mentions of David Hassellhoff compress really well.
Last time I checked, the current version of the English wikipedia dump, is around 585MB. It should comfortably fit on one CD. Where did this figure of two DVDs come from?
How will the trolls deface a read-only version of it?
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
I think it's a good idea to have wikipedia available in other formats than just online, but isn't the whole point of it that anyone can come and edit the articles to make them more correct? You couldn't do that with a DVD version. And unless someone is going to go through every article before putting it on a disc, you'd run the risk of buying an encyclopedia with some things blatantly wrong. I could envision pranksters trying to sneak in false information just before the DVD release...
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
I thought the whole idea behind wikipedia was that it is constantly changing. Will updated dvds be sold? And if so, will previous buyers get a discount?
You know how controversial subjects in the Wikipedia get fights over entries. Back and forth it goes, with one person putting their "truth" and then the opposite side removing or replacing it with their version of the "truth." Now, just picture it: The deadline for the gold master version to be put on disc is announced, and like people pouncing on an EBay auction at the last second, the warring factions will rapidly replace each other's versions of an article, hoping that their version is the one to be immortalized on disc.
I wonder... does this 2-DVD set include all articles from Wikipedia? (As opposed to some just selected somehow...) Also, I wonder if the DVD version will include all the version changes to the articles. If not, then perhaps the best version was picked out somehow?
Hmmm... This is what I think needs to happen: Wait a few more years for Wikipedia to gain even more information, and then put some kind of button on pages that allows users to "vote" for that page to be included in a dead-tree encyclopedia version of Wikipedia. The idea is to put only those articles that have the highest votes into a traditional-style encyclopedia that can rival the likes of commercially made ones. Of course, there would need to be ways to cite sources, to make the encyclopedia worthy of academic research and the like, and preferably there should also be a way for people who want to do other stuff than write articles to submit photographs or whatever kind of artwork, of their own creation and released under the free license of Wikipedia, for inclusion in the articles. For the print version, people might be able to vote for the "best" photographs and artwork for inclusion. At that point, it should be a matter of running some perl script or something to typeset the whole darn thing. This might find its way into libraries and into peoples' homes. Imagine that!
How often do existing pages change? Maybe in a case where people catch errors.
I have a spare 20GB lying around that I would install this on, if there was some way to sync it with the current state and have it download new pages and update current ones.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
...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.
This would be great for schools. They could buy the DVD set and set up a local "mirror" of Wikipedia to increase access speed and decrease Wikipedia bandwidth usage.
...when I say, "two single-layer DVDs, or dual-layer?"
In order to publish and SELL this information on CD/DVD, does the Wikipedia Foundation have to get the permission of all the article writers, or is there, perhaps, a clause on the website that says something like 'we own all the stuff put on here'. What would happen if Slashdot sold versions of article comments on DVD?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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.
It makes sense for laptops which aren't always online. If you're writing a paper on your laptop and want to look something up, but can't easily get to a hotspot.
Because their site is slow, and the search engine always seems to be disabled for "performance reasons". I would consider it if the DVD included an enhanced search feature.
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.
On each Wikipedia article, there should be a button where users can vote an article as being "worthy" for academic research and the like. Articles that receive high votes would actually get published in a monthly (or even by-weekly) magazine... So, for example, each month, subscribers would receive the magazine in the mail, and it would contain, in addition to paid advertising like any other magazine, something like ten or fifteen articles randomly chosen from Wikipedia. These would cover a broad range of topics. One month, you might receive a magazine with articles about Argentina, transaxles, grep, electromagnetism, George Washington, the Berlin wall, Apollo 9, goldfish, ballpoint pens, and cow manure. Some subscribers will already be familiar with some of the topics; others might not be interested in some of the topics; but chances are that if you pick up this magazine and read it, even for a few minutes a month, you'll learn some interesting new facts here and there, usually about topics that you'd never consider reading about in any serious manner, but which you're reading because the Wikipedia Magazine happens to be there.
Links at the bottom of articles would direct the reader to the article online. This would serve an additional purpose: People who find something missing or something that could be improved in an article would perhaps be more likely to find out about it and then go online and fix it, thereby improving the quality of the entire Wikipedia.
Money from subscriptions; money from advertisers in all fields (not just technical, and perhaps based on the content of that month's magazine) would finance the magazine and help finance Wikipedia. I see this as an opportunity to make quite a profit on something that is free, while mainly benefiting the community by doing so.
German people dont necessarily speak english and vice versa. And two DVD's is a lot of space. And 4 cd's isnt even a DVD. And just because other people use multiple disks doesnt mean its a good idea. I remember playing riven and having to switch disks way way to often. And for a Encyclopedia there would be a 50% chance that you would have to switch disks everytime you looked something up. That would be rather annoying when trying to do any research.
You know, Wikipedia is ripe for a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy treatment.
Put it in a little handheld, stick an Ipod hard drive in it, give it a usb port so it can grab updates, and presto.
As for Wiki itself, "At least where it is inaccurate, it is definitively inaccurate." -Douglas Adams
It's hard to get a more friendly distribution method than that!
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
And instead of a "DONT PANIC" sticker, they'll put on a "DONT EDIT" one.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
Anyone know if they have any way of stopping this?
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
First, to "lock in" decent versions of controversial articles. But second and more importantly, to be able to produce a stable, constant "edition" that can be referenced and cited to. How do you cite Wikipedia, when the content is always changing? Now you could write a paper and cite something like Person, Random, "Wikipedia Article," Wikipedia 2d ed. (2006). Very, very, important if WP is to become a legitimate source of information.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
... maybe the zealots who use Wikipedia as their ideological battleground (e.g. this, this, or this) can host their own wikipediae, with their own versions of The Truth, and thus the revision wars on the original Wikipedia will stop.
Or not.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
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
What's the point? Wikipedia is an inherently online medium. The articles change daily, new ones are created, etc. This cannot be reasonably placed on a static medium.
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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
self upgrading... and of course, based on GNU/Linux
13-4=54/6
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.
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I hope the take the history of Mathworld as a warning as what can happen in the publishing world.
How are they going to get a Snapshot of Wikipedia in which there is no vandalism in any of the articles?
It's called "editing".
You've been reading slashdot too much.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is about the Wikimedia Foundation , not Wikipedia Foundation which doesn't exist. /. post are wrong.
Both the article and the