Wikipedia Offers Offline Access through CDs

Wikipedia is coming up with a CD which contains nearly 2000 handpicked Wikipedia articles from the English version of the encyclopedia. The aim of the CD is to highlight the information from the free encyclopedia to people without net connection.

The Wikipedia version 0.5 CD collection covers topics including geography, arts, literature, science and history. These articles are handpicked based on their quality and importance. The disc will cost you around 13.99 (£7), which seems a bit high for information which can be freely accessed otherwise. Torrent Freak points out that Wikipedia CD can be freely downloaded from BitTorrent. I’m not sure if downloading via torrent is legal or illegal, but it doesn’t make any sense as the information is already available on the internet and you can access it whenever you want it. Moreover, the CD contains only 2000 handpicked articles from the English version of the encyclopedia, compared to the whole English version currently contains more than 1.7 million entries. Perhaps, you could download the CD and burn it with an intention to share it among your friends. The torrent is no more available on BitTorrent, but you can download it from our mirror.

The CD is one of the first offline ventures by the Wikipedia community. A DVD of 239,000 hand-checked Polish Wikipedia articles and the French version of the CD will be coming up shortly. The entire Wikipedia can be downloaded to your hard drive, mobile or any other portable storage device using a tool called Webaroo.

I wonder what took Wikimedia so long. This way, they can easily raise funds to keep the afloat. They could start a store online to sell Wikipedia branded shirts and bags, something like what Mozilla and Digg have been doing since ages.

Source: Sizlopedia