4/5/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
2011 articles? On CD ROM? The numbers of PCs with a CD-ROM drive but without an internet connection is probably not very high. Now if this was a _printed_ copy then it would be more useful to developing countries. The motives behind this are commendable, but I don't see it working in practice.
This project seems quite useful to me. If you're trying to get a class of 50 students to browse materials at the same time, you may often find computer centers that have a few dozen computers but a flaky internet connection that can't really serve more than a handful of them at once; and without much of a 'net filter, meaning that it's hard to keep students on-task (why read an encyclopedia when you can play your favorite free online game when the teacher isn't watching?).
Moreover, I like this small footprint; it makes it hard to get lost. Every link you follow is to another of these 2000 articles; you can find your way around the collected texts, and back to something familiar, without trouble. Wikipedia Proper makes it very hard to say "I'd like to spend the afternoon browsing general geopolitics; please hide all other links".
I would love to see a dozen projects like this, each with a different focus... and we might benefit by encouraging these projects to improve the articles they select by editing and fact-checking, not only by [non-]inclusion.
--SJ
David Gerard wrote:
http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)
- d.
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