I just uploaded a DVD ISO image (bzip2, ca. 1GB; ~1.3BG uncompressed) to the wikipedia server. It contains a snapshot of the German wikipedia, including images, for offline browsing under Window$. It can be found at http://download.wikimedia.org/wp_de_2004_05.iso.bz2
It comes with a self-written installer (hereby under GPL, will upload source soon) for the webserver software. You can choose if you want to copy the database and/or the images to the hard drive as well, or leave them on DVD. For the fulltext search to work, I highly recommend to copy the database to HDD.
Get it to work: 1. Decrompress the ISO image 2. Burn the ISO image to DVD 3. Run the Installer 4. Go to the installation directory and run "start.bat" (twice if it doesn't show the homepage right away) 5. To shut down the local web server, run "stop.bat"
As the pages are generated on-the-fly from a sqlite database, and that generation is done by a relatively new C++ software, many little bugs are to be expected. Math display doesn't work at all.
Note that when copying the database to HDD, one can actually edit, preview and save pages!
I consider this more a proof-of-principle rather than a product distributable on a large scale, but I strongly believe it is an important step in the right direction.
Some things I'd suggest for further development: * Auto-update to current online version via internet * Sumbitting offline edits to the online version * Another web server that runs directly from CD/DVD (no need for installation) * Linux and Mac software, running on the same data
BTW: Does anyone know a filesystem compression software that runs under Windows and doesn't require manual installation? If we could reduce database/image size by 50%, it would all fit on a CD again (for now).
I'll be on vacation for two weeks, starting tomorrow, so I might not answer to all suggestions/criticism right away.
Magnus
P.S.: An alternative would probably be a static HTML dump and HouseSpider ( http://freshmeat.net/projects/housespider/?branch_id=28546&release_id=16... ), but it requires Java.
By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying charities that provide computers to Africa. According to a few different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000 people.
It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is distributed with them. So I'm contacting a few charities to see what their experience suggests would be best.
In the meantime, I am thinking that ease-of-use for people who are not technically savvy will be critical. What would be nice would be a CD-ROM (DVD-ROMs are surely more rare for this target market) distribution that is (a) easily runnable in windows, with an autorun.bat or whatever you call it in windows (b) easily runnable in Linux (should be easy to do) and possibly (c) bootable by itself, i.e. the CD-ROM could as well be a bootable tiny linux distro for the sole purpose of providing a Wikipedia "kiosk" for a library or other public access point.
I feel confident that if we develop an ISO to do these things, it will be easy to raise money to press 10,000 copies (or more!) to distribute to these organizations with proper contacts and infrastructure in Africa to ensure that they are put to good use.
--Jimbo
I think the "bundling" would be great - after all, that was one of the ideas at the very beginning, even back at Nupedia...
I am uncertain, however, if we can get it to ship on CD. 1.3GB for the German wikipedia alone is a lot. We could * convert all images to their thumbnail size (remove the "original") * avoid images altogether (even so, the sqlite db is still 400MB) * use compression (which will work fo text, but might require writing our own "wiki-browser")
The infrastructure (Windows autorun, Linux version, bootable) should be much less of a problem.
Magnus
Jimmy Wales wrote:
By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying charities that provide computers to Africa. According to a few different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000 people.
It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is distributed with them. So I'm contacting a few charities to see what their experience suggests would be best.
In the meantime, I am thinking that ease-of-use for people who are not technically savvy will be critical. What would be nice would be a CD-ROM (DVD-ROMs are surely more rare for this target market) distribution that is (a) easily runnable in windows, with an autorun.bat or whatever you call it in windows (b) easily runnable in Linux (should be easy to do) and possibly (c) bootable by itself, i.e. the CD-ROM could as well be a bootable tiny linux distro for the sole purpose of providing a Wikipedia "kiosk" for a library or other public access point.
I feel confident that if we develop an ISO to do these things, it will be easy to raise money to press 10,000 copies (or more!) to distribute to these organizations with proper contacts and infrastructure in Africa to ensure that they are put to good use.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Friday 21 May 2004 14:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying charities that provide computers to Africa. According to a few different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000 people.
It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is distributed with them. So I'm contacting a few charities to see what their experience suggests would be best.
If it is for Africa, make sure to include French and Arabic Wikipedias alongside English.
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Friday 21 May 2004 14:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying charities that provide computers to Africa. According to a few different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000 people.
It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is distributed with them. So I'm contacting a few charities to see what their experience suggests would be best.
If it is for Africa, make sure to include French and Arabic Wikipedias alongside English.
Which pedia should depend on which countries are receiving this. There are also a few Portuguese speaking countries in Africa.
Ec
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