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."

Comments

No net connection?

[HoosierPeschke]

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

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.

Re:No net connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

People without net connections might have friends with net connections. Or they might just get some help from their local librarian. Word-of-mouth will be how they find out about it. It's not a plan designed for total market saturation or anything, but it isn't crazy either.

Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose?

[garcia]

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.

Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose?

[brian0918]

So basically you're saying that if people can't get the most updated information, they shouldn't get any information at all? Brilliant!

Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose?

[Jarjarthejedi]

I think what he's trying to say is more like if you can't get the most updated information then why use Wikipedia at all? And he's right, there's no real point to Wikipedia (beyond a large volume of data) compared to other encyclopedias if you don't access it online.

Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose?

[shawn(at)fsu]

Some things don't change on a day to day basis. Say for example the location and the history of a mountain. Gratned is someone dies climbing it well you wont know the latest and greatest but at least know something. Would wikipedia be that much less valuable if updates were performed monthly instead of daily?

Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose?

[Vampyre_Dark]

Pointless? I think that's way off base.

There was a point when your random, off the shelf encyclopedia didn't have a reputation either. That's built up over time. And a cheap disc of Wikipedia can be very helpful to some people. The fact that anyone can add to it doesn't change the fact that it's still an encyclopedia.

It's biggest strength of wikipedia is also it's biggest weakness. You can't read about any software that isn't under the gpl without seeing a page that's been hijacked by GPL zealots time after time. Hell, the fact that 3DS Max is NOT under the GPL and free is somehow more important than anything else about the software, despite the fact that's it's the industry leader/standard 3d modeller and renderer. The articles about 3D software are all really about how you should be using Blender instead, because it's GPL. Just like every other software page. So much for the NPOV policy.

An article about a person in the public eye often turns into a battle gound and then a daily log of that person's life by an obssessed fan who thinks what they had for breakfast on friday is important information. Factual information that paints them in negative light is often editted out by these same people.

Then we have magazines and newspapers editors who think it's funny to write articles about how they vandalized an article. We have Stephen Colbert logging onto Wikipedia during his show, and making article edits. Even my local newspaper had an article written that detailed a spree of silly article edits along the lines of turning into a werewolf if you visit a certain country on a certain date. This is a columnist in his 50s, not a 15 year old kid.

The whole thing is overrun by GPL Zealots, anti corporate hippies, immature kids, obssessed fans, bible thumpers, etc. None of these types are competant enough to make Neutral Point Of View contributions. Not to mention the fanboys who flood serious articles with video game, comic book, and star wars|trek references.

How is a 12 year old kid, taking everything in there at face value, supposed to seperate the BS from the truth so they can get their school project done? Especially when you have older people who should know better, filling it with such facts as 'E = MC Hammer'.

The disc distribution can solve that, and users can feel confident that the information contained therein is actually worth something. The disc may be the only version that is ever really usefull as an encyclopedia. The online version could be best used as a temporary editing version, with real versions being pressed and distributed, and competantly edited.

I don't get it.

[kabocox]

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.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't care less about.
Couldn't.

Re:I don't get it.

[PurifyYourMind]

That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

Performance

[FunkyELF]

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.

Re:Performance

[interiot]

As someone else said, you're probably not the target audience. Wikipedia's benefits not only include the fact that it's constantly updated, but also that it's free as in beer, and free as in speech, both of which are designed to try to spread the wealth of knowledge to places that couldn't otherwise afford many textbooks or commercial encyclopedias, including third-world countries. Wikipedia also will be distributed on the One Laptop Per Child, another way that Wikipedia hopes to distribute the knowledge to far-flung areas.

Also, Jimmy Wales is trying very hard to encourage the growth of native-language Wikipedias in third-world countries, to make sure it's accessible to nearly everyone, but that's slower going since network infrastructure is still in its infancy in those places.

Re:Is there a pool going yet?

[The One and Only]

And the number of inaccurate articles on the Brittanica or Encarta DVD is...?

Intermittent connection

[tepples]

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.

Re:Intermittent connection

[NerveGas]

The real benefit here, which seems to have been overlooked, is access to all of that information in places where bandwidth is either very poor or non-existant - or, where political pressures make it impossible or unwise to view the information online. I could imagine these DVDs being passed around in countries like China...

OLPC

[bytor4232]

I can see these distributed to poor nations benefiting from OLPC. Include this with the PC given out to the poor and needy.