Hi guys.

I run the "wikipedia for schools" static version and am looking at size/ download possibilities for the 2008 version. Clearly we will keep offering this for free but I wonder if anyone has a better "how to" solution.

The 2007 thumbnails version is 700 Mb and even 8 months after launch people are still taking 500Gb a month bandwidth on downloads. The larger version ( 2.3Gb) was on Torrent but that seems to be broken so we are mailing out DVDs at a high rate too.

Current list of rated articles is nearing 30,000 ( 8x last year) so either we have to think about a very different product (won't run direct from a DVD file, multiple disks) or we have to select much more on relevance as well as just taking acceptable quality. Probably we will go for a size where thumbnails or mid image size version still goes on a DVD, where we have 8-10,000 articles and where we have a larger version at 5Gb or so for some sort of compressed download. However, when we put a newer larger version up we are worried about just how big the bandwidth might be. Also whether to re-try Torrent, whether there is something better and whether to use a remote download service like Amazon.

SO: you guys must have some really big downloads and bandwidths to handle and understand them much better than I do. What should we go for to provide this free service to offline static users at a minimum price?

BozMo