Wikipedia Encyclopedia on your handheld

[Colin Dunstan]

jkOnTheRun is pointing this morning to a website that offers detailed step-by-step instruction how to convert the complete Wikipedia to TomeRaider 2 or 3 format.

Be aware that currently image support in TomeRaider is still buggy so even after a successfull compilation many images may not show up.

[hacker]

I've seen this site before and tried it scripts, they don't work. The instructions do not work.

Soo... I decided to do it myself:

Wikiquote in Plucker format
Wikipedia in Plucker format (this one is HUGE)
Wiktionary in Plucker format

Below are some screenshots.. I'm working on cleaning it up quite a bit, and I might add some iSilo versions as well, but you get the idea. I have non-image and with-image versions, but with images its so prohibitively large to download, I'm going to be selling those on either CD/DVD or on SD cards directly.

You saw it here first! <grin>

[Alexander Turcic]

David these screenshots look gorgeous!

encycloPlucker 2005? Cannot wait to put my hands on it.

[sUnShInE]

Seriously gorgeous.

But I have to ask: How big are the files? (gulp)

[SirOops]

TomeRaider image support is now stable.

English and German Wikipedias with images are now available for PPC and Palm.
File sizes for the English version range from 1 Gb to 2.6 Gb, depending on size and number of images.

More at http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/

[Colin Dunstan]

Thank you for the heads up and the link, SirOops!

[hacker]

There's NO WAY that the TomeRaider version of Wikipedia is including images, not unless they're excluding 99% of those images from their version.

I have the full archive of Wikipedia mirrored here and the images from 2005 alone are 70 gigabytes uncompressed. Even if you could compress every single image by 99%, that's still an enormous archive, not including the text of each article..

The 2007 version of Wikipedia's images is 300 gigabytes alone.

It simply can't be done, not on current Palm devices with current storage. Even an 8gb SDHC card won't hold text+images.

There are some ways to do it (Plucker can do inter-pdb links for example, so you can have one-letter-per-pdb and link between them), but its still a problem.

[HarryT]

I would guess that, in April 2005, Wiki was somewhat smaller than it is today.

[SirOops]

> There's NO WAY that the TomeRaider version of Wikipedia is including images,> not unless they're excluding 99% of those images from their version.

Thanks to a recent breakthrough in information technology images can now be resized.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by SirOops

> There's NO WAY that the TomeRaider version of Wikipedia is including images,> not unless they're excluding 99% of those images from their version.

Thanks to a recent breakthrough in information technology images can now be resized.

Sure can, but not enough to have them usable and get even a small fraction of the total number into anything that can be read on a handheld device. See David's comments about the total size of the images on Wikipedia back in 2005, and assume it's much bigger now...
______
Dennis

[HarryT]

One can, however, fit the whole of the text of the current Wikipedia onto a 4GB memory card. See the recent thread on the subject on the iLiad forum.

[hacker]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

See David's comments about the total size of the images on Wikipedia back in 2005, and assume it's much bigger now...

Just a minor update... those images come in at 2.5TB now, for the English version of Wikipedia.

I've committed to get the Wikimedia Foundation a storage server once this project takes off a little bit, to help alleviate their strain with creating image dumps, and give them some thanks for allowing me to create this product for everyone who wants to buy a copy.

Even if it were possible to compress 99% of the size out of those images, we're still looking at 250 gigabytes just for images, not including page content itself.

That being said... Now that I've found myself with some more spare time on my hands, I've rebuilt the Wikipedia and am going to be rolling out versions very soon (once I figure out the best/most cost-effective distribution mechanism).

There's some minor issues with Greek fonts and some obscure encodings, but it does work, and looks great! See attachments below for the current version's output so far...

[Adam B.]

Since Plucker is supported by FBReader, I'm very interested in this.

Even a text only version without images would be great on the iLiad...