WikiPod brings (some of) Wikipedia to your iPod

Being the highly edumicated folks we are, we prefer to lug a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in a cart wherever we go, but we suppose the proletariat might prefer something a bit more convenient. For them there's this new "WikiPod" script from Matt Swann that pulls down a wiki page, along with all of the pages it links to -- and all the pages they link to and so forth -- until it hits the maximum megabytes you specify, or bumps up against Apple's 1000 note limit for the iPod. Of course, if you've got an older iPod, you could always run Encyclopedia on iPod Linux, or you could just bust out your phone and utilize one of the numerous mobile Wiki solutions, but whatevs. We figure the perfect solution to all this would be a Linux-based Apple iPod phone, but we suppose that might be asking a lot.

[cheese ball of death @ Oct 14th 2006 5:01PM]

this is old news engadget. i had the linux version months ago.

[Billy Bob @ Oct 14th 2006 5:13PM]

seriously. you don't become OMFGORZ 1337 H4X0RZ by saying "i knew about this ago!!!!!!!1!1111!!"
NO ONE CARES!!!!!!
MOST OF US HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN TRY TO FIND EVERY PIECE OF NEWS BEFORE ENGADGET

[Billy Bob @ Oct 14th 2006 5:14PM]

And plus, they even said:
Of course, if you've got an older iPod, you could always run Encyclopedia on iPod Linux, or you could just bust out your phone and utilize one of the numerous mobile Wiki solutions

[Mrfreezie @ Oct 14th 2006 5:05PM]

Proletariat
Function: noun
Etymology: French prol�tariat, from Latin proletarius
1 : the laboring class; especially : the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live
2 : the lowest social or economic class of a community

>.>

[Lt_Ladle @ Oct 14th 2006 5:26PM]

actually iPod Linux runs on the new ones too (I'm not sure about 5.5, but its a good bet). My friend says hes got all of Wikipedia on his, and I've seen it in action. Of course he never uses it except to "show off"... but I guess it could come in handy in some rare occasions...maybe...

[Zeke @ Oct 14th 2006 9:15PM]

...ALL of wikipedia?

[Naj @ Oct 14th 2006 7:53PM]

Wouldn't this be more useful in the new iPods because they have the ability to do text searches? I reckon it would pretty much destroy your thumb spinning the wheel trying to find something that starts with "N" or something in the middle of the alphabets.

[that kid from the Simpsons. @ Oct 14th 2006 9:25PM]

I wonder how many gigs "all of wikipedia" uses?

[shirizaki @ Oct 14th 2006 9:57PM]

Text only, I copied a wiki page, came to about 83 kb in notepad and saved as Unicode. There's around 1,500,000 articles on wikipedia. Go with 100 KB for each wiki page, and you get 150,000,000 KB, which is 150 GB. So 2 of those shiny new apple iPods would store all of wikipedia's TEXT. Pictures would take another 2 or so.

[Bloobie @ Oct 14th 2006 11:29PM]

A compressed full copy (minus images) of Wikipedia is currently 46GB. With only current revisions, it's about 2.5GB. 1.5GB without talk and user pages.

[Dave Pevsner @ Oct 14th 2006 11:38PM]

ould be useful on something with a keyboard (say, that new zaurus digi dictionary that out-pimps every UMPC on the block in terms on hardware but the software is meant mainly to be an electronic dictionary), that way I can actually type something in.

Speaking of apple, anyone know where to download a motter tektura font package for free? ed2k and all my BT sites aren't helping.

[Magallanes @ Oct 15th 2006 8:07AM]

It's really useful the information of wikipedia?. At least my experience with wikipedia is it's filled with fanboys datas, wrong information and specially "i think that.." text.

[Kevin @ Oct 15th 2006 3:49PM]

You don't actually need to lug around the EB in a shopping cart. They've had their concise database in iPod format for months now:

http://www.ipreppress.com/Pages/Reference/Concise.htm

[Scott @ Oct 15th 2006 3:52PM]

All your Wikipedia are Belong to iPod

[Stern @ Oct 15th 2006 5:52PM]

I'm one of the more educated users of iPodLinux, so I can explain a little about encyclopodia. The original version only worked on iPods up until the 5G. It would take a converted version of wikipedia (which was converted into one file) and allow you to search through it to find the articles that you wanted. There was only text, and the links between articles worked. The english version of Wikipedia (the largest one) was actually only about 1gb. I converted Wiktionary a while ago, and it (amazingly) was only 20mb. There is another version that works on 5G iPods.

iPodLinux cannot be installed on the Second Generation Nano or the 5.5G because Apple was nice enough to mess around with their encryption setup. We have not been able to get around it yet, but I'm sure that the iPL developers have been working on it. For those people with a First Generation Nano or a 5G, there are slight issues when installing because Apple removed the SysInfo file, which is what the installer and other programs used to determine which generation the iPod is. This can be solved by downgrading to either the 3-23-06 installer or by copy-pasting a SysInfo file onto your iPod in the appropriate location.

[oracle @ Oct 15th 2006 6:18PM]

You can also access a WAP version Wikipedia on a mobile phone or PDA with Wapedia.

http://www.en.wapedia.org/

Of course, the downside to all this mobile access to Wikipedia will be the temptation to cheat a little on the next trivia night down at the bar.

[KS @ Oct 15th 2006 8:10PM]

there's also www.webaroo.com -- pretty nifty; according to their numbers, wikipedia ~6 GB