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Originally Posted by eschwartz
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.
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Yes, a bit over 10 GB (compressed) for just the text. Yet there are prepackaged versions of the Wikipedia out there that do not require post-processing, so you're talking about a few minutes of a person's time to queue up the download. I'm not talking about download times here because that doesn't require user intervention, but clearly it is not a grab and run situation. (It takes about 1 day at 1 Mb/s, adjust according to your download rate.)
Now it is clear that only a tiny proportion of those articles would be read. Even if you read 0.01% of the articles, that would be 450 articles. Reading that much would take a fairly determined Wikipedia devotee. Yet it would take about 8 hours to curate that 450 articles vs. a quarter of an hour to queue up that download and copy it to your device. (Again, I am only talking about the time that involves human interaction.)
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You also won't have to update them ever, whereas Wikipedia gets updated multiple times per minute...
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Depending upon your interests, there may be no reason to update the Wikipedia. Many articles are already complete, so they aren't heavily modified. Clearly this won't include current events and obscure topics, but it is still more complete than most encyclopedias and even many dedicated books on the subject matter. I am quite happy browsing my 3 year old copy of the Wikipedia, albeit on my tablet (which has an app that uses those prepackaged bundles and a lot more storage). Still, there are people who may wish to do so on an ereader.