Hello :)

As per a suggestion from Angela on the tech-l list [1], I'm re-posting here and adding some more background...

I'm looking for a offline (ie, not gprs/3g/wireless) viewer for Wikipedia on a Symbian phone.

aka, something that: * downloads the latest data dump * processes it somehow * builds some doodah that I can put on a memory card * slot into my phone, and search/access/read wikipedia content

The offline part is key. Any pointers?

I'd also be interested in trying to get the software that does this in an open source setup, as I can think of a couple of other large datasets I would like to be able to carry around in my pocket.

I currently have a nokia 6680, with a 512Mb card. The English Language Wikipedia appears to be ~900Mb compressed, so there are a couple of issues:

* Either I'd need to split it up across 2 seperate cards * Find some way to throw away some articles (maybe stubs?) * Or maybe once the formatting is squished for a mobile / text only format, it would come in smaller anyway. * Or wait until I get a phone that supports 1Gb of memory...

I'm thinking that although there is a web browser in the phone, I'd be quite happy with a simple plain text version of the data. Adding images would push the size too high.

Regarding how to navigate, a simple search across the titles ought to suffice. I have a london streetmap app installed [2], which lets me type in the street name and in real time filters the streets down. I'm guessing there must be a few hundred thousand streets in London, so it ought to scale up to ~ million wp titles. The point is that it demonstrates a decent user interface technique to navigate the content

Anyway ... thoughts?

[1] http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-September/031758.html [2] http://www.lumisoft.net/london/index.htm