[Wikipedia-l] Re: Snapshot wikipedia installations in schools

[Tim Starling]

>   After feedback from teachers, I have two requests :-
> 
>   1.	Graphics	(you knew that was coming !)
> 
> 	To determine feasibility of this, can you give me
> 	an idea of the size of a potential graphics archive ?
> 	An incremental snapshot would almost be mandatory for
> 	this, I think.

We've avoided doing this in the past for legal reasons, but I think with 
an appropriate disclaimer on the download page it shouldn't be a 
problem. To say it's worth navigating the legal hassles so that we can 
educate thousands of kids is in my opinion a vast understatement.

My suggestion for the text is:

   Please note: these images are provided for use with a Wikipedia 
installation only, and may only be displayed within Wikipedia articles. 
Many images are not licensed under GFDL and are only available as "fair 
use". Some images may be used freely, please check the associated image 
description pages. For more information see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use



Since the images are already compressed, many with an LZW-type 
algorithm, it probably wouldn't gain much to attempt to compress 
further. I'll make an uncompressed tar file.

>   2.	A daily SQL update for the main page.
> 
>   	This will give it a newsy feel, instead of talking
> 	about Mandarin Chinese for two months :-) I know
> 	that some of the articles it refers to will not be
> 	available, but ... tough.

As Ashar Voultoiz pointed out, you can obtain the wikitext for any page 
using Special:Export. Perhaps someone could write a script to regularly 
download the wikitext and save it to a database.

-- Tim Starling