Wikipedia Goes Mobile 118
eldavojohn writes, "Webaroo has added Wikipedia to their services on mobile devices. There have also been open source efforts to deliver it to the iPod (also check out the wiki) or a PDA. I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs." Wikipedia requires 6 GB of free space, 10 GB recommended. And remember: Don't Panic.
The whole database already available on the zaurus (Score:3, Informative)
6 GB? I'm panicking already (Score:3, Informative)
I think I'll stick to just checking it online quickly on my humble Motorola A780.
Not really new news (Score:3, Informative)
Dump troubles? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download [wikimedia.org]. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).
The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)
In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.
However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:
Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.
No need for all that space (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, that's the only reason I ever use the internet on my phone.
Re:6 GB? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but I actually know something about this... My job this summer revolved around this issue, and seeing how much of Wikipedia we could cram into about 10 MB. (Hint: OLPC [laptop.org] is using a subset of Wikipedia as its primary out-of-the-box reference material.)
The images on Wikipedia as of this January are about 76 GB in size. Now, assume we can switch to low-quality JPEGs and cut the size down to 5% of its current - about the size you'd get from switching all the images to black-and-white, in fact. Making that jump is a big assumption, but even that only gets you down to about 4 GB.
Text-wise, the Wikipedia database containing all current article info (no discussion pages, no history, etc.) is 1.7 GB - compressed. It's significantly larger when uncompressed.
There - 6 GB total. And that's an achievement...
Re:No need for all that space (Score:2, Informative)