Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia In Your Pocket, $99
An anonymous reader notes the announcement by Sean Moss-Pultz (Openmoko, Inc.) of a new geek device: The $99 WikiReader. All of Wikipedia in your pocket with no Internet connection required. Works in bright sunlight. 3-button interface. You can update the information in the WikiReader either by mail (they ship a microSD card) or by downloading a 4+ GB file.
An encyclopedia in the form of an e-book for $99. Sorry if I'm not too excited...
Love the idea but I'm a little cautious of Wikipedia's search engine. Not sure if they're rendering the php the same way and using MediaWiki's built in search engine but I have problems with that if they are. For instance if I search for hottest pepper the answer is the seventh result. On Google, it's the second result but also found in the first (being on the page for Scoville scale on Wikipedia).
The time this would be really useful to me is when I get into arguments at bars or restaurants with friends. I'm a bit concerned about how well the search part of this device will work for that, I'd probably need to rethink a lot of my searches to start at an obvious Wikipedia page and then lead me to my answer.
Probably wonderful for just reading through Wikipedia on a bus or plane though, too bad it doesn't seem to have the images, videos or audio.
My work here is dung.
Have these people never heard of a diff? How about just letting me download the changes! The Wiki can tell them what they are.
That's worse than useless if I have to redownload all of wikipedia to keep it up to date.
Luckily I have a smart phone with internet access.
According to the rules of open source... all derivative works must also be open source.
This is hardware. Does that mean that the design, specifications and technology used are also open source?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It's perfect for my niece and nephew for school and writing reports. Just handy not having to have an internet connection. I wish the design was more pocket sized though.
it strikes me as a good solution for people who don't (and don't want to) pay $150/mo in phone plan charges.
or for people for whom battery life is a concern.
Their website is going to host 4GB update files for this gizmo. I can imagine them crawling under bandwidth costs shortly. Why not use bittorrent?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Well it found a problem. Specifically, my problem.
I was reflecting on how I would like to throw some money their way, but don't really want to donate and don't really need CD's.
I don't have a dataplan on my phone and don't want one.
This device is perfect. I will own one.
Most people I can think of who'd like this, or have some other form of access to The Great Wiki in their pocket don't see it as unconditionally gospel. It's like the rest of the internet - about right, most of the time. I don't recall ever having been wrongly informed through getting information from wikipedia - it can be (and more often than not is) ambiguous, over-complicated or over-simplified, lacking in detail, but it's very rarely wrong - there's too many anally retentive pedants on it.
I'd love to know what that 'easy' way is. Have they gone through all of en.wp's 3,060,827 articles (as of today) and flagged those appropriate? Or just the main ones? Have they got vore? Yiffing? Frottage? Yaoi? Teabagging? Dirty Sanchez? Have they got the Virgin Killers album? All of these, and thousands more are probably candidates for 'parental control' - I'd love to know how they think they've got them all, as opposed to just the most common.
1) Huge compendium of human knowledge.
2) Runs off of commonly available, easily stockpiled batteries
3) Runs for a whole year off of one set of batteries (swap Lithium for alkaline, it should run for a decade)
4) Sunlight-readable
5) Compact, sturdy and durable
Hell, at those kind of power usage levels, you could hack a small solar cell into it and it should work anywhere you've got sunlight. Imagine a complete breakdown of civilization as we know it. Books are heavy and inconvenient and make good kindling. Without electricity, compact digital forms of information retrieval become impossible. What do we use to rebuild civilization after a couple generations of this send us back to the dark ages? This thing! It's PERFECT.
Which language is it presented in again ? Oh, English. Where is it sold ? Oh, the US and Canada. While it's not a useless device, it's hardly a godsend to the native tribes of equatorial New Guinea. Most people who buy it will be geeks with money to burn on gadgets, who coincidentally live in cities and towns with cell phone access. The inaccuracy of some of the entries and overall complexity of most the entries makes it useless for simple and fast access to useful knowledge. The entry on the internal combustion engine does a good job of telling you about its history and basic principles, but doesn't tell you the plug gap for a 98 Ford. Which are you more likely to need to know as you go about your daily business ? A useful fact or a treatise on the history of engines in general ? Now if they made it so that you could add data to the dbase as you go along through life, then upload that data periodically for possible inclusion in the main site, I think you would get better and more in depth and useful data overall.
This is just as good a place as any to ask about the support of templates in this device. Important components of some articles are generate by templates. One example is the infamous [citation needed] text, which is generated by the "{{cn}}" template. Other times, important words in a sentence are used as a argument for a template, to produce some from of link automatically.
Some other mobile Wikipedia solutions, such as one I saw for the iPhone, just ignore templates. That means that important words in a sentence could potentially be omitted. In some cases, entire sections of an article may be omitted. I consider that extremely problematic.
Assuming they are properly supported, are references supported? In few articles I've seen the feature used for general footnotes in addition to references, and having those disappear could be problematic.
What about the LaTeX math equations? A lot of mathematical and Computer Science articles become completely worthless if those are omitted, but including them means included quite a few generated images for some of the more complex ones that cannot be rendered as html.
And what about the ez-timeline extention. Are the images that it generates included?
What about the hieroglyphics that articles may include by way of the wikihiro extention?
I would not be willing to use a static mobile Wikipedia that did not support templates, references, tables, external links, LaTeX equations.
Other people might insist that the categories pages be included, and that time lines and hieroglyphics be supported.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
http://www.thewikireader.com/media/pictures/wr_hand1_small.jpg
Oh, that's funny. I see something on that page that doesn't look anything like a latin character set.
The databases are the same, I don't see why this wouldn't be able to read a non-english wikipedia dump.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...