

Offline Wikipedia - Gibbon
http://jsomers.net/blog/offline-wikipedia

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electromagnetic
Wikipedia should really release a mini-portable hard drive or USB stick that
contains the majority of Wikipedia and is capable of auto-update.

I believe it would be a great source of revenue for them and enable them to
run a better encyclopaedia with less hits on their website, especially for
frequently accessed sites. I believe full integration of the offline and
online would be required.

Example: Open the Dilbert wikipedia page, you can browse through to what you
want to see. If you have an internet connection you can hit the refresh button
(or an update button) and it'll quickly check and load an updated page and
update the offline.

~~~
hughprime
_I believe it would be a great source of revenue for them and enable them to
run a better encyclopaedia with less hits on their website, especially for
frequently accessed sites_

How many people are really likely to buy this, though? With wireless internet
from your phone from damn near any populated point on the planet becoming more
and more widespread, I can't imagine too many circumstances where this would
be useful enough to pay money for.

~~~
electromagnetic
3G phones only have ~14% market integration, cell phones aren't universally
owned, actually some countries have ridiculously low adoption rates for their
internet infrastructure. 3G infrastructure is severely lacking compared to 2G
infrastructure.

There's plenty of cities here in Canada without any 3G access and have over
100,000 people and no current plans for 3G. Even areas with 3G, rarely have
usable 3G everywhere, especially around cottage country here in Ontario. The
valleys seriously hamper even 2G access, especially anywhere near the water.

The majority of people _don't_ live in metropolitan areas, so I believe this
would sell hugely. I also believe most people don't want to pay for internet
_twice_.

Edit: <http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_world.htm> Yellow is 3G. It
certainly isn't expansive access in NA and considering offline access would
likely only be required outside of major populated areas, this generally means
outside of 3G areas. _Offline_ is kind of the point of an _offline_ wikipedia.

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naz
The iPhone app Encyclopedia downloads a Wikipedia dump to the phone and works
offline. It manages to strip it all down to about 3GB

<http://www.steamheavyindustries.com>

~~~
fizx
I wonder if there's a market for a usb drive that contains webkit, wikipedia,
and the ability to transparently download deltas when connected. 4GB USB is
<$10, sell for $20, viola!

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pyre
> _Like every other nixy package, type sudo ./configure, sudo make, and sudo
> make install to get it cooking._

Arg. You don't need root/sudo to run './configure' or 'make.' You _just_ need
it for 'make install' so that you can install it to /usr/ or /usr/local. And
you don't even _need_ it for 'make install' if you are installing to a
directory that you have rights to (e.g. PREFIX=~ or PREFIX=~/local). Copious
usage of sudo seems to abound nowadays.

[Note: disregard this if you do something like wget/unpack all your sources
files into someplace like /usr/src]

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webignition
Would a site specific browser with some clever caching not be a good
compromise?

A SSB could start out as an offline Wikipedia reader with no offline content.
As and when online content is retrieved it is cached locally forever.

When an article is to be viewed the local copy is displayed. If there is an
Internet connection the Wikipedia reader can utilise various HTTP mechanisms
to determine if the local copy is stale, updating the local copy as required.

As a basic MVP that could work, albeit with an initial heavy reliance on an
Internet connection. As and when problems with this model are identified they
can be addressed and solved. For example, it may be beneficial for the reader,
when online, to retrieve not only the currently-requested article but also
linked articles up to X links deep. Furthermore, it may be feasible to
intelligently analyse a user's usage history and retrieve further articles,
whilst online, such that relevant content is more likely to be available to
the user when next offline.

To begin with, using such an application would be little different from using
the online Wikipedia. Over time the local cache would grow and the
application's reliance on an Internet connection would decrease.

Could this be a viable opensource project?

~~~
eru
You can start with a seed of popular pages instead of completely blank.

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rico37
Here's another offline Wikipedia solution: <http://aarddict.org>

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paraschopra
This article might just save me. I agree decompressing Wikipedia takes a long
time. On my machine, it took almost 24 hours. More time to decompress than
actually downloading it!

