is that an encyclopedia in your pocket?   ...   elsewhere on the web , software
tue 2005-feb-08 21:16:55 pst   ...   permalink

Thanks to TomeRaider and this Dutch guy called Erik Zachte, I now carry Wikipedia on my person at all times. How cool is that?!

It's not entirely clear to me whether the file that Mr. Zachte has furnished me with is in fact all of Wikipedia -- I mean, I know that it's just the English-language portion, and it doesn't include any images, but I'm not sure whether it's all of the English text. The TomeRaider file is 500MB, as compared with the official full database dump which is apparently 26GB; I believe the dump also excludes the images. I guess it probably does include all of the database's indices and such, so that could make it somewhat bigger... But still, it seems hard to believe a 50-fold blowup. Both are compressed...

In any case, I also grabbed the (much smaller) TomeRaider files for WordNet and IMDb (all movies since 1960). I am a walking fount of information.

This of course means that I can now carry only about half the amount of music I used to carry on my convenient, easy-to-swallow 1GB SD card. Might have to get another card!

tue 2005-feb-08 23:25:06 pst
posted by Nikita

The full database dump also includes the edit history for each page, where I believe your 500MB file does not. The current SQL dump of en.wikipedia.org is around 500MB, bzip'ed.

Damn, you're making me think about buying a Treo again.

wed 2005-feb-09 12:39:09 pst
posted by Rick

Ack! People are carrying information on everything in the world around on their telephones! The world has gone mad!

thu 2005-feb-10 14:10:11 pst
posted by Seth

My htmlified snapshot from August (English only, no images) is 384MB compressed, 2.6GB uncompressed.

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