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Wikipedia Goes Mobile
eldavojohn writes, "Webaroo has added Wikipedia to their services on mobile devices. There have also been open source efforts to deliver it to the iPod (also check out the wiki) or a PDA. I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs." Wikipedia requires 6 GB of free space, 10 GB recommended. And remember: Don't Panic.
I own the zaurus S-3200 running application Zbedic. Files are compressed to no more than 400mb total and fits in my 6gb internal hardisk of my pda just fine. the project location for the zaurus http://sourceforge.net/projects/bedic Look under english wikipedia and you can use it on a zaurus. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=51673
While one of the basic strengths of Wikipedia is its updatability, I would question the point of storing all the articles offline. Admittedly, TFA does say it'll sync up the data the next time you go online, but it'll practically eat up all your disk space eventually.
I think I'll stick to just checking it online quickly on my humble Motorola A780.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
The Wiki addition to iPod Linux (WikiPodLinux I believe it was called) has been around for awhile. At least since I had installed iPod Linux back in March.
Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).
The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)
In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.
However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:
Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Just connect to Wapedia with your phone/PDA.
Seriously, that's the only reason I ever use the internet on my phone.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Sorry, but I actually know something about this... My job this summer revolved around this issue, and seeing how much of Wikipedia we could cram into about 10 MB. (Hint: OLPC is using a subset of Wikipedia as its primary out-of-the-box reference material.)
The images on Wikipedia as of this January are about 76 GB in size. Now, assume we can switch to low-quality JPEGs and cut the size down to 5% of its current - about the size you'd get from switching all the images to black-and-white, in fact. Making that jump is a big assumption, but even that only gets you down to about 4 GB.
Text-wise, the Wikipedia database containing all current article info (no discussion pages, no history, etc.) is 1.7 GB - compressed. It's significantly larger when uncompressed.
There - 6 GB total. And that's an achievement...