After feedback from teachers, I have two requests
:-
1. Graphics (you knew that was coming !)
To determine feasibility of this, can you give me
an idea of the size of a potential graphics archive ?
An incremental snapshot would almost be mandatory for
this, I think.
We've avoided doing this in the past for legal reasons, but I think with
an appropriate disclaimer on the download page it shouldn't be a
problem. To say it's worth navigating the legal hassles so that we can
educate thousands of kids is in my opinion a vast understatement.
My suggestion for the text is:
Please note: these images are provided for use with a Wikipedia
installation only, and may only be displayed within Wikipedia articles.
Many images are not licensed under GFDL and are only available as "fair
use". Some images may be used freely, please check the associated image
description pages. For more information see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Since the images are already compressed, many with an LZW-type
algorithm, it probably wouldn't gain much to attempt to compress
further. I'll make an uncompressed tar file.
2. A daily SQL update for the main page.
This will give it a newsy feel, instead of talking
about Mandarin Chinese for two months :-) I know
that some of the articles it refers to will not be
available, but ... tough.
As Ashar Voultoiz pointed out, you can obtain the wikitext for any page
using Special:Export. Perhaps someone could write a script to regularly
download the wikitext and save it to a database.
-- Tim Starling