Wikipedia download revisited
A while ago I wrote about various ways to have an offline copy of the wikipedia. Yes, I know there are credibility issues with wikipedia, but taken with a few grains of salt and objective thinking it is one of the single most useful references online. (I don’t count search engines here – they link to other stuff – i.e. no – you can’t download google. ) So, why would anyone be interested in having it copied offline? Isn’t the great benefit that it’s constantly updated and “fresh”? Well…. if you assume that 24/7 highspeed internet access is a fixed constant… i.e. we’ll ALWAYS have an internet connection anytime anywhere, then… there would be no good reason… but..
There are internet outages/power outages, and believe it or not, there are some places where internet access is lucky to be dialup at best and people can’t afford to carry the satellite dish for satellite access around.
Anyway, the project to put the wikipedia on cd/dvd is moving ahead and had a 0.5 release it can be found at wikipediaondvd.com.
This first release is a cd and they’ve picked a small subset of articles, although it looks quite useful. Yes, I know, I’m a digital packrat – but you know something? If/when the internet has a big several day melt down I’ll still be able to do lookups in my own copy of the wikipedia.