ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

["Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)" <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Daniel

Daniel Holbach wrote:
> Rory McCann schrieb:
>>  * Wikipedia
> 
>> One of the most popular websites in the world, this is a free content
>> encyclopedia. They provide database dumps so you can create a CD or DVD
>> of static HTML pages. People can then distribute this disc and everyone
>> can have an encyclopedia on their desktop. Camara ( http://www.camara.ie
>> ) has been distributing a skinned wikipedia for a few years and it's
>> very succeful and popular.
> 
>> You could make a selection of wikipedia, or the whole thing. What would
>> be the size of it?
> 
> Jonathan has some experience with this.

I'm a big proponent of the schools collection, mostly because it has a
really good balance between relevant content and safe content. We used
to put the full Wikipedia in schools but received lots of angry faxes
and emails from teachers complaining that kids looked at the Vagina,
BDSM, Bukkake, etc pages. Now while sexual education is certainly
important, the schools Wikipedia leaves the important parts while
removing the explicit images.

It's meant to fit on a DVD so it's just about less than 4.3GB.

> The way how I'd envision this works would be something like this:
>  - we set up a bazaar branch
>  - we write a small script where you can specify what you want, ie.
>    ./update-wikipedia-copy -l de --all             or
>    ./update-wikipedia-copy -l en --no-pictures     or
>    ./update-wikipedia-copy -l en --school-edition
>    if you see what I mean

That sounds quite cool. I wonder if it could also grow into a mechanism
for a Wikipedia distribution to be managed from.

>  - once we have that working, we could work on another script that burns
>    it to a DVD or something

Yep.

-Jonathan