A quick FAQ about existing and future snapshots of the English Wikipedia.

  • For information on German snapshots, see m:Wikipedia on CD/DVD and more detailed pages on de:WP.
  • For information on multilingual snapshots, see pages here and on meta about the Mandrake collaboration (links?).
  • To be created: a global page on meta about snapshots in all languages.

Existing snapshots

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Snapshot projects

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  • Wikipedia:Pushing to 1.0, a project about generating a reviewed layer for Wikipedia content, has side-discussions about [re]using snapshots of such a beast.
    • Wikipedia:Stable versions looks are producing static and reviewed versions of articles most suitable from print at any given time.
  • A collaboration with Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft) which is underway has led people to think about preparing a DVD of English Wikipedia content similar to the existing one of German content; this gave impetus to the Wikipedia:Image tagging project last fall but has not solved many other problems:
    • finding good free software for reading/searching through such a snapshot; working out kinks in integrating this with a database dump
    • effectively stripping and reformatting pages;
    • removing articles with certain tags (vfd, et al)
    • catching recent vandalism; searching through changes made in the past week and particularly those in the past few days for suspicious edits
    • details for the image and multimedia dump; both auto-extraction of the appropriate files and attributions from en:WP or commons, and resizing images / storing multiple resized versions as necessary for the reader
  • MediaWiki 1.5 includes routines to dump a wiki to HTML, rendering the HTML with the same parser used on a live wiki. (details of use?)
  • Early discussions of creating a German DVD, on Meta, list a number of separate projects dating back to 2003 which have largely been mothballed. Directmedia'sDigibux is a working reader-project for Linux...

See also

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