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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.
What are you saying? A complete breakdown of the world of warcraft episode of south park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_co mes_to_South_Park) or the complete, 8 pages if you print it out, biography of Bender from futurama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bender_Bending_Rodr% C3%ADguez) are useless?
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...
Why doesn't Wikipedia make their own mobile? It could be updated when connected to the computer, like an iPod, and I'm sure ads for it would replace any mentionings of donations...
My name would be Pi_r_[]ed, but this stupid thing wouldn't allow it. Well, at least now you know.