[WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

Thu Apr 6 04:36:58 UTC 2006

> 4/5/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
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> 2011 articles? On CD ROM? The numbers of PCs with a CD-ROM drive but
> without an internet connection is probably not very high. Now if this
> was a _printed_ copy then it would be more useful to developing
> countries. The motives behind this are commendable, but I don't see it
> working in practice.

This project seems quite useful to me. If you're trying to get a class
of 50 students to browse materials at the same time, you may often
find computer centers that have a few dozen computers but a flaky
internet connection that can't really serve more than a handful of
them at once; and without much of a 'net filter, meaning that it's
hard to keep students on-task (why read an encyclopedia when you can
play your favorite free online game when the teacher isn't watching?).

Moreover, I like this small footprint; it makes it hard to get lost. 
Every link you follow is to another of these 2000 articles; you can
find your way around the collected texts, and back to something
familiar, without trouble.  Wikipedia Proper makes it very hard to say
"I'd like to spend the afternoon browsing general geopolitics; please
hide all other links".

I would love to see a dozen projects like this, each with a different
focus... and we might benefit by encouraging these projects to improve
the articles they select by editing and fact-checking, not only by
[non-]inclusion.

--SJ

> David Gerard wrote:
> > http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
> >
> > 2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)
> >
> >
> > - d.
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--
++SJ