Wikipedia Releases Offline CD 221
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."
Re:No net connection? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me that cost+breadth gives the Wikipedia CD a reason to be. If you can't afford an encyclopedia but want something available even when you can't get to the Internet, it seems to be a huge bargain.
It doesn't entirely supplant real encyclopedias, either, but it does narrow their audience even further.
Re:A little disappointed (Score:3, Interesting)
(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...
Would be useful for me (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
It's more exciting than online Wikipedia! (Score:2, Interesting)
Why so few articles? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Intermittent connection (Score:3, Interesting)
2000 ...? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for at least taking the time to explain why you think that way.
In my eyes, I don't trust it at all over any other encyclopedia and I have a low appreciation for encyclopedias of any kind as primary publication research is where it's at. Sometimes I wish that they would teach that sort of research earlier than high school -- school aged kids might actually learn to enjoy the research they do instead of considering it tedious.
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.
The people who make these final determinations aren't going to sneak a couple of one-sided viewpoints into the articles somewhere? After all, they aren't anymore competent at editing than anyone else on that site are they?
Re:No net connection? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't remember what finally rung the bell, but long story short: we only owned one audio CD player at the time and I hadn't used it very much. It had a 5-cd changer where you loaded the cd's shiny side up. So naturally I was trying to read data cd's..... shiny side up.
My wife bought me that player as a birthday present for something like $400. I think we finally got rid of it last summer in an electronics recycling event.