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Wikipedia Releases Offline CD
An anonymous reader writes "WikipediaOnDVD, with cooperation with the Wikipedia community, has released its first offline test version. The articles were selected by Wikipedians and reviewed for accuracy, vandalism, and importance. Nearly 2,000 core Wikipedia articles will be sold on compact disc to give people without a net connection access to highlights of the popular web resource. The CD can be purchased or downloaded online via their site or the torrent."
I pick 77 as the number of articles on the CD that will be wrong
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
That the Dragonball Z articles weren't included in the core DVD release. I mean, DBZ is notable, right?? Enough to have over 100 Wikipedia articles on it?
[...] to give people without a net connection access to highlights [...]. The CD can be purchased or downloaded online [...]
Now that's a hefty business plan.
How many wing-wongs and other vandalous images slipped through the cracks
The no net connection / download / torrent is a gimme, but where will they offer this CD for those without net connections? I could see this being useful for libraries or schools to have solid access. Advertising it to people without a net connection seems to be pretty pointless as the only means of acquiring said CD is via an internet connection.
Either that or we'll start seeing Wikipedia salesmen going door to door.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
Wikipedia is a powerful tool because it can be constantly and immediately updated with new information as it becomes available. By burning it onto CD and distributing it, it becomes almost the same as any other encyclopedia available minus the cost and the fact that it doesn't carry the same reputation.
It's a good idea in theory but in reality it's sorta pointless.
Wikipedia without accuracy or vandalism problems... What fun is that?!?!?
In order to give people without an internet connection a chance to look at Wikipedia you can only buy or download this CD on the internet? Somebody didn't think this all the way through.
I'm nominating this as an AFD. This article is about something that is not covered by any notable source.
Actually, this looks like blatant product promotion. Speedy Delete this spam...
Ok. It's a CD size, why is their title wiki on DVD? Actually, I was looking for something like this just a few months ago. At that time, if you wanted an offline copy of wikipedia, you had to download something like 80GB and figure out how to install/run the wikipedia backend.
I think the folks behind this project just don't get what wikipedia is best used for. It sounds like they are trying to release the best fact checked copy that they can within those subjects. Um, that's not what I use wikipedia for. I use it to quickly figure out who this guy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen or immediate trivia that in 5 minutes I could care less about, but I just would like a vague idea of who the guy is and such. Wikipedia is great for fast trivia. I bet you most of the articles that I look up won't be on this CD because those that are making this want wikipedia to be like a book reference and all the junk that I want researched would be filtered out. Oh well, maybe it would be useful for the kids to look through.
Why is the website called wikipedia on dvd, and yet they only have an option to download a 420mb CD image? Where is the 4+GB DVD image their name implies?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Their motive is staying afloat so they don't have to see all that hard work go to waste. They're looking for ways to keep their cash flow out of the red so that they can continue to operate the site. If that requires selling Wikipedia on DVDs, or putting up a couple non-intrusive text ads, then I'm all for it. You can't pay for bandwidth and servers with smiles and good feelings.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Something makes me thing that having a local copy in place in your cdrom would take longer to load than a halfway decent network connection.
I saw the title of the article and initially thought : cool, that'd be nice to have a nice fast copy.
Then (in my head) I heard the sound of my cdrom spinning up to speed before reading an article and came to realize that most of what is on Wikipedia is just text and it loads fast enough for me and probably faster than the CD would.
You'll get modded down because your post is bunk. Of course they'll sell goodies, they're trying to keep the thing running [as another poster pointed out].
Until they *deny* access to the non-paying public they're not really violating their stated goals. It's when articles become "members only" that you can start biting your thumb at them.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
so you can edit it. Also it will only work if you place it in a publically accessible network drive so others can make changes too.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Wikipedia is a manipulative insidious organisation that's poisoning truth for profit - Yeah, non-profit organizations are all about making profit.
To those of you who contributed to Wikipedia - did you expect that your work would be exploited for commercial gain - Commercial gain? They're giving away the product if you download it. $13 might cover the cost of the CD, the average shipping costs, and the labor associated with stamping/burning the disc. Even if there's some left over, who cares? Even non-profit employees have to eat.
This is a release for Wikipedia 0.5. The next release is Wikipedia 0.7, and if you see something you not in 0.5 that you want in 0.7, cruise on over to the nominations page and let 'em know.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Wikipedia is a manipulative insidious organisation that's poisoning truth for profit. That's not a tin foil hat based statement. There's plenty of evidence.
I dont think there's anything sinister going on here; most of this money is probably going towards keeping the site up. There's nothing new about they're fundraising efforts, like when the server kept crashing.
In any case, i think this is a step towards legitimizing wikipedia as a valuable reference. The CD represents an error-checked version of wikipedia that doubters have been bitching about for some time.
How does it compare with Encarta in terms of article count?
Stop to think that efforts like Wikipedia cannot operate without money, which has to come from somewhere. Private donations can only go so far, and other corporate type money sources tend to come with strings attached. It is more likely that selling CDs/DVDs for a few bucks will give Wikipedia *more* freedom to be altruistic since they won't rely so much on others for their resources.
But what's the point? What's the convergance of a) a person who would trust the information in Wikipedia, with b) have access to a computer, that c) wouldn't also have net access? Also, with such a small subset of articles, does this have any value beyond "gee, look what we did?"
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.
Now my information can be wrong AND outdated.
If somebody has 15 minutes of net connection, would he look at live versions of Wikipedia articles for those 15 minutes, or would he spend 15 minutes buying the disc to take home to use on his own computer without an Internet connection? Examples of such intermittent connection include Wi-Fi hotspots, public libraries, and (to a lesser extent) dial-up.
Do an update and all the CDs will get fixed too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
apart from the fact that this is absolutely nothing to do with "wikipedia" - aka the wikimedia foundation. For folks sniping from the sidelines, "Wikipedia is a manipulative insidious organisation" who constantly have a go at mistakes errors and inaccuracies, you don't half talk a total crock of shit do you? DO YOUR HOMEWORK - prick.
Besides someone sneaking a Goatse pic in on the George W. Bush page, this offline CD hopes to fill the gaping hole in the marketplace.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
You're not the target audience!
It will be interesting to check back in a few months to see how many they sold.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Wikipedia has largely replaced the encyclopedia Britannica as the source for all knowledge for two reasons
... ...twice
1) It is slightly cheaper.
2) The "facts" can be edited to reflect your own personal preferences.
Fact 1) Ninjas are mammals
2) Chuck Norris counted to infinity
2000 seems like a pretty meager selection for an offline reference. Did they skip more commonplace, and thus commonly known, subjects? Or is it going to be mostly facts that the average 5th grader would know? By contrast, the software put out by Brittanica contains 10,000+ articles.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
But what's the point? What's the convergance of a) a person who would trust the information in Wikipedia, with b) have access to a computer, that c) wouldn't also have net access?
Would be handy for me at my vacation/retirement house.
For about 5 years it had no network connection whatsoever. Finally needed network on a vacation so now it has a dialup line that typically connects at 28.8 kbps. That's the best available in the area other than $atellite. But using it ties up the landline.
Nearest WiMax is Clearwire, 23 mi away on the other side of the mountain - on which I can't mount a relay. The area is served only by the LAST cell in the old AT&T network, which they haven't converted from TDMA (even though they're charging me extra for refusing to convert to GSM and thus make my cell phone stop working there.)
I'm sure that there are places in the world where browsing wikipedia would be far more troublesome, expensive, or flat-out impossible.
Also, with such a small subset of articles, does this have any value beyond "gee, look what we did?"
Probably.
Of course this is just a beta. If I read things correctly 1.0 will eventually be available on DVD once they get a suitable subset of articles picked and vetted.
Ask yourself "What good was a paper Encyclopedia Britannica?" Especially when you only had part of the set...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I find browsing it much more exciting than browsin Wikipedia, because most are very familiar to my eyes, yet I don't know them in detail. It's much more about the selection of articles than the multitude of them.
http://id3as.livejournal.com/
Didn't someone do a TV show about this?
Why only 1956 articles? I get that they want to show off the best, but Encarta 2007 has 42,000+ articles and includes tons of multimedia. There's no way a volunteer team can review anywhere near that number of articles, so I think they should scrap the "good articles only" policy and just stuff as much as possible onto the DVD.
Ok, so TFA says this is for people without net access, but it is order on their website.
Haha..
Given the amount of information we know is on Wikipedia, putting 2000 articles seems highly insufficient. Another thing is, informations dates really fast these days, and their efforts will quickly age.
Wouldn't it be much smarter if they wrote a little system to prepare those torrents automatically, say, every week, and include much larger fraction of the articles. Reviewing for vandalism is something that should happen for the online version of Wikipedia naturally by the existing editors (similar to OSS "stable" version vs "development" version).
In the 21-st Century, having enough information and always up to date is more important than accuracy. Reading an article where 20% of the info is wrong is better than no article at all. We still know it's Wikipedia and can use critical though process to check additional sources when we get to an Internet connection or the library.
Another flaw of this project, is that by handpicking the articles, it automatically means I can't download a localized version of that DVD.
And right now I really needed the localized version, to distribute to a set of computers without connection in a local school. Bummers.
Only way forward is automatization.
It's okay, the discs they are selling are re-writeable.
If somebody has 15 minutes of net connection, would he look at live versions of Wikipedia articles for those 15 minutes, or would he spend 15 minutes buying the disc to take home to use on his own computer without an Internet connection?
They'd spend 15 minutes looking at pornography.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree. I like the idea, but the article selection process is downright bizarre. I particularly like their selection under "Military Units" in the "History and War" section: the Lord's Resistance Army and the Japanese Imperial Navy. Okay ... not arguing that either are exactly unimportant ... but why those two?
I think they need to use some sort of better, more objective metric for inclusion. How about the most popular / most-often-viewed articles on WP? Or the ones created in the database first, back when WP was new? (Do they still have that data anymore?)
It may just be that 2,000 articles is too small to be anything but ridiculous. The Britannica DVD, by contrast, includes over 100,000 articles, and I don't think it's even representative of their entire database.
Overall, I applaud their efforts here, but I think they're just going to tarnish their own reputation by releasing this early. They should have held off and waited until they had a serious product -- one on DVD, that's somewhere comparable to commercial encyclopedia offerings on CD, at least in scope and breadth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Woosh!
Just curious. And how big are the most interesting ones ( have more than, say, 10 hits per day)?
Cue thousands of wikipedia clone spam sites full of adsense and YPN in 3... 2... 1...
Starting end of 2005 the (complete) German version of Wikipedia is distributed as a DVD. They did it in cooperation with a company called Directmedia. This company runs the label "Digitale Bibliothek", which is quite common in Germany. It provides high quality digital works from different fields of the liberal arts, like anthologies, handbooks and collections of paintings. You can downlaod this DVD from Wikipedia but also buy it in a book shop or via Amazon (for about 10 Euro).
To browse this DVD a small web server will be installed on the machine. Unfortunately there is only a Windows version. It runs on Linux using Wine, but on Mac it seems not to be a smooth thing.
"In the 21-st Century, having enough information and always up to date is more important than accuracy."
Don't you think that's the whole problem with today's society in general?
Turn on any of the 24 hour "news" channels and you can see what happens when they subscribe to your doctrine (i.e. "breaking news", "unsubstantiated reports", "we're first with the story!"). It no longer becomes news. How do you separate fact from hearsey?
Yeah, damn accuracy. Who needs that?
"Reading an article where 20% of the info is wrong is better than no article at all."
Not when the person distributing it is calling it the "truth" or a collection of "facts".
Burning to a CD/DVD un-does what Wikipedia is about. Now it's nothing more than a standard Encyclopeda, and a very sh*tty one at that.
Oh, the quiet slow slide into mediocrity.
I can see these distributed to poor nations benefiting from OLPC. Include this with the PC given out to the poor and needy.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
"The CD strives to be of higher quality than the online version, Walker said. He said volunteers have been scanning entries for foul language and other signs of vandalism, although they didn't have the time to thoroughly verify all the facts for the preliminary version." -© 2007 The Associated Press.
Hm. I'm off to burn a stack of these for Central Elementary!
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
Wikipedia is great - people contribute to it, people can update it at the drop of a hat and it is almost always evolving. Then they release it on a CD. I can go out and buy the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD already and it's a lot more reliable!
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
The torrent link is from the original torrent project here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0 _Editorial_Team/Torrent_Project/Version_0.5
You can download a compressed version of the .iso from a torrent, located on the site as well.
They should market a dedicated device to display the contents of the CD.
A tablet style device with all the data pre-loaded, weather-proofed and ruggedized, and runs off solar batteries... If you crash landed on a desert island, you could use it to build a new civilization.
Give it a way to update itself over the sub-etha, ehm, wi-fi, and you've got a great device there...
/sig
great idea from Wikipedia, plenty of uses for people all over the world with limited net connectivity definitely healthy competition to MS Encarta & others
TechTakeaway.com for tech related articles, videos - lots of robots
Whoa, close Windows, I sense a draft in here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wikipedia:Version 0.5 - This page is a list of articles that are on the CD. Note, the links to the articles point to the live articles on Wikipedia, not the revisions hand-selected to be on the cd.
Kiwix browser - Image of the software used for Wikipedia 0.5
Wikipedia 1.0 FAQ - answers, well, frequently asked questions!
Wikipedia:Release VersionThe next version with an incomplete list of proposed articles.
Talk page for WP 1.0 - please leave your feedback here. What did you like about it? What can be improved?
To view the data on the CD/DVD you need to use the WikiX application, which is platform-specific (no PPC support, for example). What I would have done is to store the articles as XHTML (making use of CSS and JavaScipt). Then the articles could be viewed with any browser. It would also be more useful for long-term archival use. Why didn't they do that? One reason might be data compression (store the articles is a compressed format so more could fit on a CD or DVD). Another reason might be some user-interface feature that can't be done using JavaScript, such as searching. If so, you could provide a choice of interfaces: WikiX (which allows searching and a slightly nicer user interface) or "any browser".
The funny thing is that when you pop the CD into your computer and look up "sucker", it brings up a picture of you.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Reminds me of tech support customers that call and complain about needing THE INTERNET ON CD
And then there was E
This is great! When I get deployed to Iraq this time (for 15 months!) Ill at least have access to some form of Wikipedia.
Damn that's confusing... The website linked to is called wikipediaondvd but that very website is talking about CD. I checked on Wikipedia (not kidding!) to see if a DVD was considered to be a CD but it seems not (they say that "it ressembles a Compact Disc").
Anyway... 2000 articles on a CD-Rom seems to be an incredibly small number of articles. That's an average of 325 Kbytes per article. I agree that it would be nice to have lots of shiny pictures (I guess that there's going to be a lot of shiny pictures for I hardly see the average compressed text entry to need 325 KB).
Without kidding: instead of the 2000 entries they're choosing, I'd choose 1900 entries and with the 32 Megabytes left I'd pack, what, one hundred thousand text articles?
That would be way more interesting IMHO than having only 2000 entries. 2000 entries on a CD is plain waste.
Erh... wouldn't an online update make this whole project kinda pointless?
The GP was joking, but actually I think it would be neat if you could create a local copy of WP, maybe not on optical disc, but rather on a hard drive or something, that you could continually update on an as-needed basis from the online copy, via rsync or some other smart protocol that only downloaded the differences between the existing and new files. It would be even better if you could make copies to the local copy and then re-sync it to the remote copy, applying your local changes to the remote pages (maybe only putting them up as 'suggestions' or something, to avoid mass-clobbering a lot of new material).
You could create kiosks, or just checkout copies of the DB and work on them for other projects, but then re-integrate them back upstream with all the changes. Given the number of projects that use WP as a basis, I think it could have a lot of possibilities.
Right now, if you create a WP spinoff project, you might start off with a DB dump and then improve on it, but chances are most of the changes are never going to flow back upstream; it's just too hard to apply them. If they took a cue from SVN or any of the other projects designed for change-tracking and management, they might be able to do a lot more while staying true to the goals of a wiki.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Its a great possession for students and in places like in India where Internet, Broadband Internet has not yet penetrated deep, this could be a valuable piece to own.
SOS Children used to release a version of Wikipedia on CD . I am trying to figure out how this project is different, as both seem to be from the same wikipedia community.
Furthermore, I was looking information on redistributing the Wikipedia on CD. Wikipedia content license allows you, but can CD be downloaded and redistributed for cost of packaging to others, who might not have internet access?
Senthil
And let's suppose that an article from the CD will wiki-link to an article that was left out. How do they fix that?