Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone

blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"

Comments

Survey of Human Knowledge?

[benwiggy]

"Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general summary of human knowledge we have at the moment."

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Survey of Human Knowledge?

[larry bagina]

It also seems completely random and arbitrary. If they need citations, then they need citations on every sentence/idea/paragraph that isn't general knowledge. Maybe a bot goes though and randomly adds them.

Re:Survey of Human Knowledge?

[dimeglio]

Look, this is how it works: I'm asked to find out what COBIT is. Naturally, I google it and find a hit in Wikipedia. From there, I get a fairly comprehensive idea of what it might be - with external links that I don't bother to click. I then explain to the team what COBIT is and tie it in with our business objectives. The team then might want to investigate further or get certification if it is a requirement for the job.

Now, I'm not sure what you mean by trust. I do trust that the information I gathered on COBIT is as accurate as I needed it to be at that time. Now, if I am an MD and need to prescribe a drug to a patient, I certainly would not trust Wikipedia for the dosage. I'd look it up in a medical reference on that medication and published by the drug company.

So for 90% of decisions, IMO Wikipedia is no worse than using last year's edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Re:Survey of Human Knowledge?

[An Onerous Coward]

[citation needed]

Seriously though, it's a really useful meme to tap in the middle of a debate. It's a reminder that those who seek to convince must bring evidence, and that anyone can post anything they like. When used to tag a claim that a) is very unexpected or counterintuitive, b) should be citable, and c) is central to the opponent's argument, then demand the citation. If it's tangential or a matter of opinion, then yeah, it's bastardish.

Re:Survey of Human Knowledge?

[atraintocry]

If there is a pattern, it's that the person who put [citation needed] didn't necessarily agree with the preceding statement, but either (a) didn't want it to turn into a conflict or (b) didn't feel like doing the research and (perhaps rightly) decided that the person making the claim should do it.

I think that in the aggregate they turn the tone of WP into something that's very passive-aggressive. But individually they are harmless, just pointing out the obvious ("here is a statement that is unverified").

Where I see lots of [citation needed]s is in articles that tend to be biographical or concerning an artistic work or work of entertainment. Average Pop Star's #1 fan will copy a bunch of stuff from APS-fan-forums.org and someone else will come along and think, "what is all of this (crummy) original research doing here?"

If they deleted the material, other forum members will keep reverting. But if they add [cn], most people know that if they're going to remove that tag then they'd better have a citation handy.

Obviously in very popular or contentious articles, they don't stay there as long, because more people are willing to go out and find citations that match their point of view. The only way to trump someone you disagree with in WP-land is by finding more evidence. Which is exactly how it should be. So despite their passive-aggressive side, I tend to see the [cn] as a sign that the system is working somewhat, albeit slowly.

But seriously I'd nuke half of the articles on WP if I had the authority. WP can take page views away from a site that actually *is* accurate. And there's still copy-paste jobs going on. A WP article, by virtue of being able to draw from multiple sources and have multiple editors, should be more accurate than the sources it draws from. When it's not, it does people a disservice since it's going to show up first in Google whether or not it's any good.

What a total geek....

[ColdWetDog]

1. Goes to foreign country - one that he has never visited before
2. Doesn't have wireless access.
3. Instead of wandering about the country he spends most of his time programming ("Then basically, I spent a significant fraction of my time there in Japan, again, in 2007 writing those applications") an application so he can look up stuff about the country he isn't spending much time actually visiting.

I bow before you sir. Awesome.

Re:What a total geek....

[dbcad7]

When I go on vacation to a country like that, I will buy a travel guide. I also spend a great deal of time researching prior to traveling. Having Wikipedia available 24/7 would be nice if I went off the grid that I had planned, but not life changing. Wikipedia is not that great as a travel guide. It "might" cover some things to see, and rarely things to do, but is more geared towards questions like those you asked in your post. Those type of questions are easily answered later without taking anything away from your trip.. What good is it to you though if you visit a city that has a bar with mermaids swimming in a shark tank and the wiki entry tells you nothing about it ? .. sure you will know the annual rainfall, and population density.. but your going to be pissed when you meet someone later who's been there and asked you about the mermaid shark tank bar.

Re:Another step closer

[TheRaven64]

No. The Kindle supports online access to Wikipedia, but this requires a network connection. The iPhone supports the same. A while ago someone created a cut-down version of Wikipedia which you could browse completely offline on the iLiad. It sounds like someone has ported this to the iPhone, and because it's now on the iPhone it's news.

Putting Wikipedia snapshots on portable devices is interesting. I don't really see why you'd do it with an iPhone; the iLiad takes CF cards, so you can just keep a 16GB CF card for Wikipedia and not fill up space you'd otherwise use for something else, but the iPhone's storage isn't expandable so it's a strange thing to want to do. The text of Wikipedia is not that big. A complete (uncompressed) copy is 200GB, but that includes all revision history and user pages. The current version of the English Wikipedia is around 4GB of text. This leaves another 4GB for filling up with images.

Re:Nothing new

[Sentry21]

Given the trouble Patrick had squeezing down a full DB dump of Wikipedia to fit into 2GB (for the app store), I find it impossible to believe that the 162 MB files I've found so far for Wikipedia in MDict format are anywhere near the full text (which Patrick's app is).

Re:Complete human knowledge?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

[citation needed]

I'm not really kidding. Your anti-Wikipedia rant is entertaining, but it doesn't provide any substance. Speaking for myself, when I go to Wikipedia for a refresher on something I already know about, I'm generally pleased with the quality of the results, which makes me think that the articles on subjects I don't know much about are likely to be pretty good too.

Your line about "political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities" provides a clue as to what really bothers you about Wikipedia: reality's well-known liberal bias. Unless you can provide specific examples, with citations, it's reasonable to assume that the Wikipedia groupmind knows more about the way things really work than some random dude on /.

Re:Talk to people, and public libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

Libraries - take time to get to, assuming it's even open, and can take a ton of time to locate the book you need, and THEN locate where in the book the information is. If I'm in a foreign country, I do NOT want to spend large quantities of time cooped up in a library when I could have just as easily gotten the information on wikipedia in 5 minutes, no matter where I am.

Talking to people - Personally, I'd rather not bug locals about history that's either a) sensitive (ie: a drought killing thousands), or b) common sense to everyone local. But with that option, that's just me.