I have created a standalone Wikipedia which could become the foundation
af a DVD release or a desktop/intranet version of Wikipedia, currently
Windows only (but should be easy to adapt to Linux/Mac).
I don't have anywhere to put a DVD image, so you'll have to bake your
own. All you need is my software (based on tinyweg and sqlite, running a
real, unpatched MediaWiki) [1] (ca. 6MB) and a XML dump of wikipedia (I
recommend [2], ca. 762 MB). Download both, uncompress the software (no
need to uncompress the XML file!), and follow the instructions in the
README file.
Some issues:
* The creation of the package takes time (think "over night") and disk
space (~2.5GB)
* Page rendering is a little slow, but bearable, roughly depending on
the number of links on a page
* No images
* It doesn't run directly from DVD, as tinyweb insists on writing log
files; you'll have to keep the whole thing on hard disk
Things that don't work but which should be easy to do (for someone with
time on their hands)
* Interwiki links are renderd as "red links" (should be fixable in
LocalSettings.php)
* Search doesn't work (should be fixable by patching MediaWiki, at least
for title search)
Technical note: The conversion software (GPL, but source not yet
included - too messy) generates a sqlite database with everything BUT
the page texts. These are copied into a single large text file, and the
database additionally stores the position of the respective text. That
turns out to be the fastest way to query the database. I tried reading
from a compressed text file, but the performance was horrible as there's
no way to directly seek a position in a compressed file.
Magnus
[1]
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/standalonewiki.zip
[2]
http://download.wikipedia.org/wikipedia/en/20050924_pages_public.xml.bz2