On 05/01/06, Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com wrote:
I understand (thanks to Lars Aronsson) that Directmedia Publishing in Berlin (www.directmedia.de) put the German Wikipedia on DVD (ISBN 3-86640-001-2). It sells for $10 on www.amazon.de, and $1 of that goes to the German branch of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Euro not dollars, but yeah. Handily, ten euro is almost exactly the $12 you mention below.
You might be interested to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia, where Axel Boldt has given a short explanation of the various .de publishing projects.
It may be worth noting that the German publication wasn't a straight copy of the "live dump", but rather was a slightly-filtered version - a largish team had vetted the whole set of articles and then put it on DVD. I'm not sure what level of quality you're looking at for this DVD, but without a step like this you'd be leaving a lot of dross (and a lot of potential copyright problems) in place. They also had some home-brewed searching software, rather than just a webbrowser, IIRC.
As to producing static HTML versions, I believe Tim Starling was working on tools to do just this, but I can't offhand find anything. Searching the archives of this list might be worthwhile.
One final point - you mention donations to Wikimedia. I assume (since it makes good business sense) you'd want to publicise this, and thus use the Wikipedia/Wikimedia name - this may well be preaching to the choir, but please contact the Foundation, to avoid running into trademark issues and any associated unpleasantness. (I certainly don't know what the status of using the name was in Germany...)
But all that aside, the donations are of course appreciated :-)
Best of luck, -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk