Wikipedia Goes Offline

What does it mean when a venerated Web 2.0 concoction such as Wikipedia ventures goes offline? Nothing, really. But that’s what the organization begun by Jimmy Wales is doing. For a price.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which is the body behind Wikipedia (and similar projects under the same umbrella), stated that it would offer just short of 2,000 articles, stored on a single CD, for $13.99, which amounts to just a small portion of the entire span of articles that form the ballooning online encyclopedia.

A group of academics and some of the Wikimedia staff have decided to hand-pick a selection of 1,964 articles out of the 1.7 million currently stored inside the English element of Wikipedia, rather than try to cram as many random items as possible on a single disc.

While we agree with the human selectivity behind the arrangement of articles, it’s hard to see the benefit of charging $13.99 for a single disc, particularly if it is to be sold to individuals and school classes and such who don’t have the luxury of Internet access. One dollar per CD would seem to be a price more fitting for such a project. Better yet, free-to-the-user would be the grandest choice of all. Funding would be provided by the IMF or some other organization whose role is to provide developmental aid.

The BBC has learned that the CD is “the first of many offline projects planned by the Wikipedia community,” however, so it will be right to wait and see what comes of this and other ideas based on the concept of online content-moved-offline.

A French CD of similar making is planned, which will likely be a resource sought after by French citizens and French-speaking African peoples. The price for that particular product, if any, has not been announced. Also, in the several weeks’ time, a DVD of vetted Polish-language Wikipedia articles will be released.

There are plenty of ways to read community creations on Wikipedia for free today, even without an Internet connection, but the articles must first be loaded to devices like smart phones, PDAs, and iPods in order to access the content. The Wikipedia Version 0.5 CD is the first of it’s kind created, at least by The Wikimedia Foundation.

The only widely known project understood to load Wikipedia articles onto discs is one orchestrated by the charity SOS Children in 2006. The chosen articles’ subject matter was oriented for the 8- to 15-year-old crowd. The articles were voluntarily “tidied up” by the charity.