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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...)"
"Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general summary of human knowledge[citation needed] we have at the moment."
There. Fixed that for you.
There. Fixed that for you.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This is easily doable.
Once you trim the earth reference down to "Mostly harmless".
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
xkcd comic reference
Yeah, pretty much you're turning your iphone into a hitch hiker's guide to earth, or at least america and europe if you can manage to squeeze wiki-travel onto it.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
That problem has recently been solved. With the recent addition of sms-sharing, you could use any iPhone remotely.
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
This is nothing new. Wikipedia has been available for several years now in MDict format: http://www.octopus-studio.com/product.en.htm
FTFA:
Already done.
However, I'm not sure that I want precisely what this iPhone app is. It strips out references, and from the sound of things also the discussion pages. I'd say about 1/2 of articles I check the discussion pages to see what's really going on. Also he says he strips a lot of the metadata, and obviously images, none of which are things I"d want to give up (some of the metadata might be superfluous, but if I'm copying Wikipedia onto my computer, I want to copy Wikipedia onto my computer.)
I understand there are licensing issues with images, but even so, the SVG ought to be safe. And that wouldn't add as much of a disk space hit as the gifs, etc.
One of the other issues is the timing of Wikipedia dumps. They only do text-only dumps, and according to the article they only happen once every few months. It would be nice to implement an image review policy, and figure out a way to allow for mirrors (or just some increased bandwidth at Wikipedia HQ) so that we can actually have the entire English Wikipedia, regularly snapshotted and compressed, available for download. And really, for that kind of thing a 3-month or even yearly turnaround would be well worth the wait.
... so clearly this app will never make it through Apple's review process.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In all seriousness, I'm starting to get extremely annoyed by what is IMHO flagrant abuse of the [citation needed] tag on Wikipedia, I don't know how many times I've seen it used in situations where it just wasn't needed. And I don't mean in "But anyone who spends all day working on FOO knows that BAR!" situations but more along the lines of "The earth orbits the sun[citation needed]." or even better "Sir NameOfArticle was in his day frequently regarded as a national hero in $COUNTRY.[citation needed]. <Six paragraphs that detail, with plenty of sources, exactly how famous Sir NameOfArticle was.>".
I've actually begun wondering if maybe there are certain individuals who are deliberately trolling Wikipedia by adding [citation needed] in places where it just doesn't belong and then sit around giggling as they read the discussion pages of various articles they've messed with.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
So, I'm reading here that they convert the XML into proprietary metadata and compress that.
Why not use EXI (Efficent XML Interchange) http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/ which has been tested as more efficient that gzip and requires less memory to parse? Especially since the XML processing can remain the same, since the nodeset is the same.
[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 /.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I bought this application 6 months ago and there are 3 majors problems with it:
1) The search function is broken because you need to type the exact word (prefix)
2) This is plain text: no pictures and no tables so most articles with "list" are useless
3) No update mechanism so the dump used will be outdated soon.
try this link from your mobile phone:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/
That way you get the whole thing, up-to-date, and with no trouble or major memory usage.