Wikipedia heads offline
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WIKIPEDIA volunteers have begun working on an offline version of the online encyclopaedia that can be distributed on CD.

A preliminary version of the CD was released earlier this month. The goal is to extend Wikipedia to those with limited or no internet access. Success with the CD could ultimately lead to Wikipedia in book or other forms.

The move will what contradict what Wikipedia's advocates view as the online encyclopaedia's key strength: Volunteers can quickly respond to new developments and errors in the collaborative online encyclopaedia by adding or changing entries themselves.

"Plenty of people do not have internet access. They have a computer and no internet, or just a slow internet connection," Martin A. Walker, the Wikipedia volunteer who helped coordinate the project said. "There are many times when you may be offline anyway. You may be at a camp or something like that."

The development comes as the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 36 per cent of US adult internet users have consulted Wikipedia - 8 per cent on any given day. The telephone-based study issued Tuesday also found Wikipedia usage higher among college graduates and younger internet users.

With Wikipedia, anyone may add, edit or even delete entries regardless of expertise. Although that has led to pranks when hit television shows mention Wikipedia or endless revisions when dealing with controversial topics like abortion, the site's dynamic nature allows volunteers to quickly step in with fixes.

The reference has grown to more than 1.7 million articles in the English language alone since it was founded in 2001.

The Wikipedia CD will have only a subset of that - about 2,000 articles, with a heavy emphasis on geography, literature and other topics that won't change much the way current events and controversial subjects might.

"We did shy away a little bit from deliberately taking on those topics," Mr Walker, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam said. "This is a CD that is going to be around for a year or two."

The CD strives to be of higher quality than the online version, Mr Walker said. He said volunteers have been scanning entries for foul language and other signs of vandalism, although they didn't have the time to thoroughly verify all the facts for the preliminary version.

Mr Walker said the cleaner version should appeal to teachers worried about displaying pages that might contain foul language at any given moment.

Many educators, though, have been warning students against using Wikipedia because entries aren't necessarily vetted by experts.

The CD is available for $US14 (16.90) plus shipping through the project's web site, wikipediaondvd.com.

Despite the site's name, Walker insisted the contents must fit on a CD, noting that many home computers do not yet have DVD players. The CD works with Windows 98 and later, Mac OS X running on Intel-based Mac computers and Linux x86 systems.
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