Not sure exactly where this mail comes from (/me
perplex)... but
text-only encyclopedia, though safer, is a bit restricted :-(
For text-only: check out wik2dict and dict. dict is a client/server
hypertext protocol. wik2dict converts Mediawiki SQL dumps into the
(gzipped) dict format. Usually the result takes up less space than the
*table.sql.gz that is downloaded.
I'm currently working on a http gateway to dict that is more friendly
than the thing that's running at
dict.org. I'll probably install it at a
Geekcorps server, together with the Bambara and French Wikipedia-dicts.
I think it would be cool if a Wikimedia server can be used to server
dict stuff. It's really less resource intensive, and would be a nice
backup for when the real servers are too slow. It also queries all
different dicts at once (i.e. Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks in
many languages). I'll post the link to htdict once it's finished :)
I actually would prefer we set up a system with
taggued pages than to
strip all images :-( but well... it takes less room
I've actually been thinking about doing something like Tomeraider does.
Maybe there is more interest in this. I think it's ugly that people are
kind of forced to use a proprietary format to have Wikipedia on their
PDAs.