Jimbo cheaps out on a wedding gift Options

[thekohser]

Can't believe I missed this, but Jimbo surely has no shame.

This weekend I am attending the wedding of my friends Martin Varshavsky and Nina Wiegand.

... I wanted to get a gift, but first of all, Martin is a very successful entrepreneur who obviously can have any ordinary thing that he wants.

... Well, I just can’t stand to go to a wedding without a gift so I thought really really hard. What would Martin want and appreciate, that I might be able to get?

And suddenly I realized it. Martin has been bugging me to help him figure out a way for his Educar charity to distribute Wikipedia (in Spanish) to schools without Internet connections. The problem is that there has not been a simple offline reader on a DVD in Spanish (or, really, most other languages).

... So, this blog post is my wedding gift. I’m putting some effort into pulling together the people who are working on this… and finding some new friends to help us get this done!

I’m looking for more volunteers to help with the effort. SJ (a fellow board member at the Wikimedia Foundation) is helping coordinate various people, and we’re launching a new mailing list to get this effort some energy.

... Mozel tov, Martin and Nina!

He even crowdsources his generosity.

[Krimpet]

The last successful static dump of enwiki, in June 2008, was 208.3 GB. The newlyweds will probably be long past their golden anniversary by the time scientists are able to fit that onto a 4.3 GB DVD.

[Somey]

The last successful static dump of enwiki, in June 2008, was 208.3 GB. The newlyweds will probably be long past their golden anniversary by the time scientists are able to fit that onto a 4.3 GB DVD.

True, but that's uncompressed - that version compressed down to 15GB, and the capacity of a Blu-ray disc is about 50GB. So if you could do on-the-fly extract/decompress, it might work... Or else distribute the compressed version on four DVD-R's, and just assume everyone in Argentina has the necessary disk space to decompress the whole thing onto a hard drive. (The Spanish WP is much smaller than the English one anyway, of course.)

Or else you could just excise the parts of WP that are of no legitimate educational value, leaving you with about 46K uncompressed, give or take.

[Krimpet]

True, but that's uncompressed - that version compressed down to 15GB, and the capacity of a Blu-ray disc is about 50GB. So if you could do on-the-fly extract/decompress, it might work... Or else distribute the compressed version on four DVD-R's, and just assume everyone in Argentina has the necessary disk space to decompress the whole thing onto a hard drive. (The Spanish WP is much smaller than the English one anyway, of course.)

Or else you could just excise the parts of WP that are of no legitimate educational value, leaving you with about 46K uncompressed, give or take.

Hah, right, I forgot this is the Spanish Wikipedia being discussed. (I guess I'm just a typical American. )

I don't know if eswiki has higher editorial standards, but enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools, preferably by professional editors paid by an organization that can coordinate the effort. Like what Veropedia and the "New World Encyclopedia" attempted - it's a shame the former relied too much on volunteer laypeople to succeed, and the latter is run by Moonie fruitcakes.

This post has been edited by Krimpet: Tue 22nd December 2009, 2:37am

[Somey]

...enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools...

You don't think that's really going to stop them, do you?

[dogbiscuit]

...enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools...

You don't think that's really going to stop them, do you?

It hasn't for some time - it already exists with the careful oversight of David Gerard among others.