Wikipedia Version 0.5 available on CD
The hard-working Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team have now completed the first stage of their ultimate goal: 1,964 of the best (many featured) articles of the English Wikipedia are now available on a CD costing $13.99 (around £8.50) from a French firm called Linterweb. A proportion goes to the Wikimedia Foundation.
You can also download an .ISO (’image’) of the release, which, like the disc itself, contains static versions of each article and open source software written to display the articles offline called KiwiX.
Update (08/04/07):
While this is certainly an important step towards a useful offline edition of Wikipedia, I don’t quite understand the people on foundation-l who are saying they will buy it. Why? It’s online for free! I’d suggest donating to the Foundation instead. The target audience for WP 1.0 is not Wikipediholics like us, it’s those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a good quality encyclopaedia - for example, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project which inspired Jimbo to announce One Encyclopedia per Child.
I said this on foundation-l but I’m not sure if people understood me. Someone else made a similar, better-formed point later on which I clarified was what I was attempting to say.
Read the announcement on foundation-l and Titoxd’s post with interesting information on how we arrived at today’s news.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
The CD version of Wikipedia 0.5 has many long term goals. For now it is a ‘test run’ of course, and it will provide content for those who cannot pay the bandwidth cost of having a consistent live version. It’ll definitely help the sneaker nets out there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaker_net) - carrying a WP dump on an HD isn’t as easy to carry as the Wikipedia 0.5 CD.
For those of you with bandwidth to spare, download, seed and enjoy the torrent versions:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3658466/Wikipedia_Release_Version_0.5
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3658470/Wikipedia_Release_Version_0.5_(bz2)
April 10th, 2007 at 5:22 am
Why?
Because it is a piece of Wikipedia history, of course.
No, seriously, you do have it right. The CD’s target audience is not editors who make 1000+ edits a month, but rather it is those who a) don’t have access to the Internet; b) have limited or unreliable access to the main site; and most importantly, c) those who want static content.
Also remember it is Version 0.5, not Version 1.0 - it can be described as a low-profile test version, designed to prevent bugs in larger, more general distributions to come in the future.
April 10th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Don’t get me wrong, I do think this is a very good idea, and nice to see such progress. 0.5 will lead to 0.7 and then to 1.0, which I’m sure will not be the end of it