[WikiEN-l] Re: Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

Wed Mar 23 19:04:26 UTC 2005

[cc to wikipedia-l]

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Will Wikipedia fit on a CD or DVD?
> How big is the "current article" database? (Excluding the text 
> of all previous versions, because some articles have been 
> modified over 500 times!)

The en: SQL dump is over 500MB compressed (.bz2) - that'd be well
over a gig uncompressed.

> What are Wikipedia's plans to move toward 1.0 and issue a Disk,
> Book, or Multi-volume set?

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 ...

> How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia 
> (in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or 
> Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any 
> public libraries in Africa?)
> If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
> for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?

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.