Jens Ropers wrote:
On 14 Sep 2004, at 06:34, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote:
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:47:09 -0400
From: Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
had for under $500
Which is COMPLETELY out of reach for probably well over 90% of the
world population. They just can't spare $500. Nevermind electricity
(good point).
--Jens
The logistic problems of distributing 100 M words on paper are
interesting too. My best guess would be 100 BIG books, each with a
printing cost of $5 each (with a large print run > 10,000), total cost
$500 per encyclopedia. (Unless the printers of telephone directories can
do better than that). A "best 10% of articles" version would cost a more
reasonable $50, and take up 10 volumes. Tiny print could help, at the
cost of usability. Still, at least there's no need for power, and more
than one person can access it at a time in a library or school. Does
anyone have a better guess for printing costs?
One thing which can be done, though, is to piggyback on existing
charitable projects like Computer Aid (
http://www.computer-aid.org/),
which distribute second-hand computers to developing-country educational
projects. Computer Aid's cost per PC to a recognized not-for-profit NGO
is £39. The cost of installing a static copy of Wikipedia on these
machines, or supplying it as a DVD, would be near zero.
There's also a U.S. university project to send cached bulk educational
Web data to African universities, given that even when they have
computers and electricity available, Internet access is still very
expensive by the standards of the developed world. We should talk to
them, so we can get Wikipedia included in their data package, but I
can't remember their name,
-- Neil