Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
Sure it's reasonable. It takes a lot less time to download the Wikipedia than it does to create your own selection of articles that you may, or may not, be interested in. That would be useful for a person who is going to be offline for a period of time, or who doesn't have internet access where they read.
This isn't necessarily a concern for urban and suburban dwellers who can quickly fetch an article on their mobile phone, but there are still plenty of places in the world where the cellular networks are nonexistent.
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True, Wikipedia is *only* 10GB of bzip2-compressed data to download (text-only, does not include pictures I believe)... but very little of it will be used. There are over four and a half
million articles, and it would take a lot longer and consume more disk space to scrape the bzip2 archive and turn it into useful ebooks which use the less-efficient ZIP archive.
News articles, being targeted, will have a higher percentage of useful articles.
They will also be a lot smaller, depending on how many sites you download from. Wikipedia as ebooks would be a minimum 10GB and with worse compression, and formatting added in, should shoot to a good 25-30 GB.
You also won't have to update them ever, whereas Wikipedia gets updated multiple times per minute...