[Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)

[Robert Rohde]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
<snip>
> The technical specifications of such a device allow for it to be extremely
> cheap.
<snip>

I think you are underestimating the size of Wikipedia.  Even
compressed a snapshot of the English articles with both text and low
quality images would run you 20+ GB.  At that storage capacity a
handheld display device using modern technology would cost $200+,
which is probably way too much to ask a third world person to pay.
For comparison, OLPC has a total capacity of only 1GB.  In another
decade perhaps it would work, but I don't think it is currently an
economical project to talk about giving large numbers of people static
copies of Wikipedia.  (There is perhaps something to be said for
distributing a much smaller core subset of articles though.)

-Robert