Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
Converting wikipedia into use as the Kindle's default dictionary might not be trivial but it would also not be insurmountbale.
I don't know if wikipedia is capable of being stored locally on the Kindle. Storage space increases as costs of storage decrease so we might expect that future Kindles will have the capacity. I would expect a local version of wikipedia to be loaded onto my Kindle at the factory and then automatically update itself periodically, probably over wifi, but even that might be too much of a strain on the bandwidth.
More realistically, we could expect a wikipedia app on our Kindles, to function as our default lookup. This would require a constant connection to the internet which the 3G Kindle has. It would probably also require an upgrade or two to the Kindle firmware but we want wikipedia and I expect that we will get it.
To that end,
let us all email: kindle-feedback@amazon.com
with the subject line: Wikipedia Please!
You can fill in the body yourself, it's fun!
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there used to be a project (I don't think it's maintained anymore) called 'wikipodia' that allowed you to store the whole of wikipedia on your early generation ipod. If I remember correctly, it clocked in at about 3 GB.
Who knows how big wikipedia is now. Plus, wikipedia is constantly being updated so it would be hard to stay current with a local copy.
We already have a wikipedia 'app' on our kindles (in a sense):
highlight a word, push the spacebar, and select 'wikipedia'.
I see what you're saying though: it would be nice to be able to select that as the default instead of a dictionary.
I really don't think that's feasible either because it would have to either open in a browser window (which is what we already have) or... be locally stored in a mobipocket format, which brings us back to where we are.
EDIT: excuse me, the project is called encyclopodia
http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html