[WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

[Neil Harris]

Jens Ropers wrote:

>
> On 14 Sep 2004, at 06:34, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:47:09 -0400
>> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>>
>> A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
>> had for under $500
>
>
> Which is COMPLETELY out of reach for probably well over 90% of the 
> world population. They just can't spare $500. Nevermind electricity 
> (good point).
>
> --Jens
>
The logistic problems of distributing 100 M words on paper are 
interesting too. My best guess would be 100 BIG books, each with a 
printing cost of $5 each (with a large print run > 10,000), total cost 
$500 per encyclopedia. (Unless the printers of telephone directories can 
do better than that). A "best 10% of articles" version would cost a more 
reasonable $50, and take up 10 volumes. Tiny print could help, at the 
cost of usability. Still, at least there's no need for power, and more 
than one person can access it at a time in a library or school. Does 
anyone have a better guess for printing costs?

One thing which can be done, though, is to piggyback on existing 
charitable projects like Computer Aid (http://www.computer-aid.org/), 
which distribute second-hand computers to developing-country educational 
projects. Computer Aid's cost per PC to a recognized not-for-profit NGO 
is £39. The cost of installing a static copy of Wikipedia on these 
machines, or supplying it as a DVD, would be near zero.

There's also a U.S. university project to send cached bulk educational 
Web data to African universities, given that even when they have 
computers and electricity available, Internet access is still very 
expensive by the standards of the developed world. We should talk to 
them, so we can get Wikipedia included in their data package, but I 
can't remember their name,

-- Neil