As you may know, the German Wikipedia has been published on DVD several times now, the last one only a few weeks ago. This is thanks to directmedia [1], a German company.

For this last release, they have changed their data format to accomodate the sheer mass that is Wikipedia. Instead of their (proprietary) reader software, they now use a software that acts as a mini-server so one can read and search Wikipedia from DVD or harddisk in the browser. While this mini-server is proprietary as well, they have asked for the development of an open source implementation, opening their format description [2].

DaB has written a version in Java, and I have started one in C++/wxWidgets. I put mine into SVN, "yawr" (Yet Another Wikipedia Reader). Article browsing with images works quite well already, and I'm working on (fulltext!) search, some special pages, and a zillion other things.

Just letting you know what that thing is I put in SVN, and inviting everyone to help.

Merry Christmas, Magnus

[1] http://www.digitale-bibliothek.de [2] http://wiki.directmedia.de/index.php/ZenoReader/Open_Source