[cc to wikipedia-l] Poor, Edmund W wrote: The en: SQL dump is over 500MB compressed (.bz2) - that'd be well over a gig uncompressed. So far my plan [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] appears to be the closest to a coherent plan. It relies on [[m:Article validation feature]], which Magnus has decided will be polished up for inclusion in MediaWiki 1.5. This plan is so far a way to produce a 1.0-ready distribution. We have a paper publisher who might be interested, but it would have to be a CONSIDERABLY cut down version - think single-volume encyclopedia, because the current en: text would be bigger than Britannica if printed in full ... We can do a dump to DVD very easily ;-) en: and fr: would at least make a start on covering Africa. We could probably include *all* the local languages with that, as their Wikipedias are much smaller. (There are small considerations like copyright liability in an environment where you can't just remove violations from the online history ... but never mind that for the moment.) I have no idea if anyone's investigated the practicalities of distribution in Africa. However, I can guess that Africa is blanketed in minute detail by other charities, and I have no doubt we could hitch a ride with several, which would get a DVD into every school. Possibly even something to run the DVD on, and something to power the thing to run the DVD on ;-) (Or just a cheap PC with a hard disk full of Wikipedia and a DVD for backup.) - d.

Poor, Edmund W a écrit: The French Wikipedia has been looking to do such a cd/dvd in the past 6 months (hence the drive launched by Yann Forget to tag all images, included in the english wikipedia). Last time I heard, a cd was necessary for fr and a dvd for en. We are in relationship with a firm called MandrakeSoft to do such a distribution. They distribute a version of Linux and wanted to add Wikipedia to their distribution last christmas. It was reported. There was recently another meeting, where they mentionned they would prefer an individual release (rather than a common release with other software). I am not sure a deal will be possible though. Amongst problems raised is the one of responsability of the editors. I started looking into it quite seriously early 2005, with contacts in several french speaking countries. Most contacts were related with young children schools and the equivalent of libraries. One with a university. Generally, there was interest (if not huge interest) but naturally, as expected, the issue raised was the one of computer and internet line. You'll tell me, why internet line if on a cd ? This is a big point : we have to admit that a big part of our content does not necessarily fit the needs of some of the target people in these countries. And what the associations I went in contact with insisted that they did not want to just be handled a cd from west to use. They wanted the resource provided to strongly participate to local development. In short, if wikipedia is made available, they want it for real, with net lines, and participate to the building of the resource themselves. With the needs, come the features. So, the justification of the install of computers and net lines in a village THROUGH wikipedia, allow the village to get access to outside world and join it. Not be nourrished by it. With the internet line, all the uses of the net come along and stimulate development. In short, a DVD, why not, but the desire was for the full product. Note that it was then mentionned a neat feature could be a system so that they could post articles through mail, or a system where they could work offline and have their content synchronised from time to time. I had to unfortunately put aside all this research (or nearly all of it) due to reallocating my priorities. Most of the associations we could work with are located either in Paris (where I do not have time to go), or in Africa (where I do not have either time or money to go). And I think at some point in the discussion, it is necessary to meet people. And I had to cut some big branches in my activity recently. However, I intend to proceed in that direction when I have more time again. Waerth and Danny were working on setting up an organisation in Thailand some time ago. I do not know what is the current state of this project. I think there would be two big issues at hand. How to handle the responsability of the editor ? (who ?) Where would be the volunteers to help ? To which I will add It is easy to start an article, and just stop if we do not feel like it anymore. When getting involved in a probably long lasting and time consuming operation, such as finding a school interested in CD, finding old computers, setting up computers, shipping them, helping with install, checking its usefulness etc... is far less easy than just starting an article. What I mean is that to start such a thing, we need a real team of people to get involved, and we need this people to feel really committed to it. And I think this is the highest difficulty.