[Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)

Sun May 31 13:34:31 UTC 2009

2009/5/31 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>> Wikipedia over TV would never work. There isn't the bandwidth for it.
>
>
> So only broadcast a subset.

A very small subset.

>> TV is a broadcast medium, that means you have to be constantly sending
>> everything anyone could want (or, at least, sending it fairly
>> frequently, like teletext does).
>
>
> Presumably there's a hard drive at the other end.  On one channel broadcast
> updates, on a second channel broadcast random articles weighted by relative
> importance.

TV's with hard drives are a pretty new in the developed world and
presumably all but non-existent in the developing world, I would be
very surprised if many people have a TV with a hard drive and no
internet access (or, at least, no ability to get internet access if
they wanted it). So, you would have to give people these hard-drives,
so you might as well fill them before you hand them out. So, what you
are suggesting is the same idea as Brian suggested but with the
ability to update articles over TV transmissions - not a bad extension
to the idea, but it's the same basic idea.

> By the way, I'm not really sure what you mean by "TV is a broadcast
> medium".  But presumably anyone without Internet access but with TV access
> is receiving the TV signal through a broadcast, so I can safely ignore this
> nitpick.

By "broadcast medium" I mean a one-way transmission of information.
The TV people choose what you broadcast and you just choose to either
pick up what they send or don't. You can't request specific
information like you can online. That dramatically increases the
bandwidth requirements, since you have to broadcast everything.