Looking for volunteers to create Wikipedia on CD application

[Alejandro Tejada]

Hi Mark,


Mark Wieder wrote:
> 
> Yeah, that was the one case I thought of where it might be useful to
> have a static, albeit somewhat outdated, snapshot of the data. Of
> course, considering that Wikipedia doesn't for the most part require
> broadband access where dialup would do, the following chart is
> probably more to the point:
> http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
> 

The key word is cost, not velocity.

Talking with teachers from public schools, i have learned
that many of their student's families could afford one computer
for the whole family, (here exist an enormous market for
second-hand computers) but these families could not pay the
monthly cost of Internet service that starts at US$60 dollars
for 256KB... Costly, as you noticed.

Their economy allows these students to pay for an hour of
internet access in an internet center for US$1 (one dolar)
or more.

In theory, every public school should have free internet access.
In practice, the number of public schools with internet access is
disminishing not increasing, although newspapers constantly
publish news that said otherwise. (Just talk with the teachers
and students)

Two CD (for texts and images) will cost US$0.66 cents or less
and could hold a whole encyclopedia. This is less than a single
hour of internet access. (A single 4.5 Gb DVD could be still cheaper,
but not everyone have a DVD reader in their computer)

No matter how you calculate this. It's an economically sound
decision to distribute the Wikipedia for offline use among public
school students.

Members of this community have the skills to build this project.

The only remaining question is: 
Could we lend a hand to collectively create this project,
as a gift from this community to students everywhere?

Goals and direction should appear from consensus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus

:-D

For this project, I believe that we should be able to contribute
with Password protected libraries, for specific functions or
features. In this way, your code is protected but still available
for use in this project.

I could write some code and test the application
in Windows XP and Vista.

Alejandro
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