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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."
Not only is this a test release of Wikipedia 0.5, but nominating articles for the release isn't a quick process. Get over there and nominate some for 0.7; lets get this baby to fit on a DVD. I share your zeal.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
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.
Maybe, maybe not.
A selection of articles that are proof-read and vandalism-free but maybe a year out of date might be a good trade-off in some cases. Kind of like 'stable' versus 'development' versioning.
And if no-one buys the CD version, no harm done.
The full version of WP's current articles is a XML dump of 4.7 GB. That alone fits on a DVD. Then there are about 60GB of images (plus all the images in Commons). Getting a copy of every article you want would take up at least a Dual-Layer Blu-Ray even with the best of compression (you can put it in a database smaller than the XML dump), and you can down-res most larger images.
They realized they couldn't do that, so instead they picked a few hundred articles, and got the most accurate copies they could. It'd be great if they could do that for the whole corpus of WP articles, but that's not currently feasible in terms of optical storage, processing power, fact-checking, etc.
They should be careful for first grade, though - this is an adult encyclopedia, and we didn't censor it. If you take a look at things like Mozart's article (2nd paragraph), you'll see the kind of thing I mean - important to include in an adult release, but not what I'd want my second grade daughter reading! For young kids, I'd recommend the 2006 SOS Kids release. That has no browser, but every article should be kid-friendly.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
You can make a local copy. Just install MediaWiki, then Download the Wikipedia database and import it into your SQL server. Rsync is already available to download updates to the database, and it would be fairly trivial to write an application to attempt to submit all local updates to Wikipedia. Of course, articles that have drastically changed while you were offline might pose a problem. The only problem, the database takes over 10gb of hard disk space for the English Wikipedia articles, with no images.