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Wikipedia Planning a DVD Version

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the encylopedia-netannica dept.

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.'"

17 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Another reason the German version fits on CD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Frequent mentions of David Hassellhoff compress really well.

    1. Re:Another reason the German version fits on CD by Stevyn · · Score: 5, Funny

      AndbecauseGermansdonotwastebytesonspaces

    2. Re:Another reason the German version fits on CD by the+pickle · · Score: 5, Funny

      I believe what you meant was "Onderspacen Der Deutschennobegewastenderbytesen."

      p

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    3. Re:Another reason the German version fits on CD by arodland · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Another reason the German version fits on CD by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny
      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.

      That's right. "Railway", for example, derives from "railuswayus" and was not concatenated by English speakers. We also didn't coin "email", "Internet", or "loudspeaker" - we borrowed those from Swahili.

      I'd go into more detail, but I'm off to check my voicemail and weblog (Spanish).

      --
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  2. Whaaa? by Zone-MR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Whaaa? by amliebsch · · Score: 5, Funny
      Where did this figure of two DVDs come from?

      Well, when you add in the theatrical trailers, "making of" featurette, production stills, and commentary tracks... What I want to know is, will it be in Dolby Digital 7.1?

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    2. Re:Whaaa? by Servants · · Score: 5, Informative
      I followed your link:
      Last dump made: 2005-03-09 (30 days ago)
      Total size 50503MB (1460MB for just current revisions)

      These are SQL dumps of the current and old article revision databases for each wiki. They can be read into a local database and directly used with the MediaWiki software (MySQL, PHP, Apache required).

      These dumps are not suitable for viewing in a web browser or text editor unless you do a little preprocessing on them first.
    3. Re:Whaaa? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, not all of us are connected to the Internet 24/7.

      What the hell's wrong with you?

  3. Neat idea, but... by kyle90 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Mad dash to make "corrections" before it goes gold by FunWithHeadlines · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. I think I speak for all the nerds here... by Phexro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...when I say, "two single-layer DVDs, or dual-layer?"

  6. Re:Is this legal? by teslatug · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have a read.

  7. Re:Is this legal? by remahl · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Where is the Great Publishing House of Ursa Minor? by AeonOfReason · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  9. Re:Why? by amliebsch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  10. A bit of history on this by Raul654 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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