Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I suspect there are a lot of you out there who are Wikipedia critics, but I think that on the whole it is an awesome resource that can provide a lot of people who perhaps can’t afford a real, dead-tree encylopedia with a lot of knowledge for very low cost.
Except of course, that to use it, you need a computer with an internet connection.
Or do you? Today’s cool link courtesy of the Make blog was to a project called The Humane Reader. The idea is to build a cheap ($20) computer which can be used to store (at least a large fraction) of the entire Wikipedia database onto a flash card and provide a simple 4 button interface and TV output (PAL or NTSC) to all this data. Thus, for less money than we would spend on a textbook, you could provide access to all the information on Wikipedia (currently about 6gb of data, compressed with bzip).
I think it’s a pretty nifty idea. The technical details of the project are fairly easy to understand: if you are used to hacking Arduinos, you could probably grasp everything that he talks about.
It got me thinking about the possibility of projects that might be doable with the Wikipedia database. It’s all available as a compressed XML database, so lots of things are possible with a little programming. I found the following link to be pretty interesting:
Another related project is WikiReader (http://thewikireader.com/). Although a bit more expensive at $99, it includes the screen. The 8GB card that came with mine is large enough to fit both the full English Wikipedia as well as several smaller languages. The source code as well as tools for massaging the Wikipedia XML dumps are published on GitHub.
By the way, the biggest paper-based Norwegian encyclopedia has already caved in. The articles will continue to be available on the net thanks to private funding, but I suspect it will die a slow death because it is too hard to attract editors.
Nifty stuff indeed, thank you for sharing.
I no longer have a paper encyclopedia, actually I am switching my old oreilly computer print books to ebooks, just so I can gain space on my bookshelf for art books.