At 05:40 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Mark Richards wrote:
I appreciate the sentiment, but why? There can't be very many people installing the latest Mandrake distro who don't have an internet connection? Perhaps some, but really, how many people are going to find this more useful than a link on the mandrake desktop? Mark
http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/demographics/article.php/3316541 shows that for the United States, only 67% of urbanites have Internet access and 52% of rural inhabitants have it. http://www.clickz.com/stats/markets/broadband/article.php/3409671 indicates that only 29 million broadband users in the US, which is a little over 10%, so a lot of Americans are relying on non-broadband. Having an actual physical right-there copy of Wikipedia could be quite handy.
I bet a nice market could be school libraries in not-so-well-off neighborhoods. They could buy a cheap second-hand computer, stick a Mandrake Wikipedia on it, and presto - a top-of-the-line (by some standards :) encyclopedia that the kids could even make copies of and take home if they wanted. I recall someone was asking about this very possibility a month or so back, he wanted to install Wikipedia in some local schools and was looking for a way to download the image database to go with the text.