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

Thu Mar 24 05:38:40 UTC 2005

Poor, Edmund W a écrit:
 > 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 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.

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

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.

 > If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
 > for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?
 >
 > Uncle Ed

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.