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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
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[...] 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.
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?!?!?
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.
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.
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.
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 on CD was already taken by a guy providing only 1.44 MB floppy images.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
2. Many people who have internet service know what Wikipedia is. Some of these people see some value in Wikipedia.
3. Some of the second group may be civic-minded enough to buy or download the cd and share it with people and organizations that do not have internet service but might be interested in Wikipedia.
4. Finally, some people have internet access sometimes but would like to have access to most of Wikipedia all the time.
It may not be the biggest blockbuster product of all time, but there are enough potential customers that this is worth trying.
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.
Now my information can be wrong AND outdated.
Pfft.... the Dragonball fancruft had to make way for articles with much greater use to humanity, such as this one.
:-/ )
(Can you believe that there is such an in-depth article for that subject? It says something about Wikipedia, though whether it's good or not is unclear...
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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.
Patrick Volkerding? Is that you?
My blog
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/
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
I can do you one better.
Personally, I think it's great. Makes you think, if the Knuckles article is 10 pages long, how many pages is the rest of the sum of all knowledge?
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.