Wishlist/Wikipedia Mirror

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Wishes warning! This article or section documents one or more OpenMoko Wish List items, the features described here may or may not be implemented in the future.

A local copy of wikipedia that you can browse anywhere without incurring bandwidth costs. It's already been done for the iPod (see encyclopodia), but I think we can do better on the Neo. For starters, it has a much nicer screen, and a real UI toolkit to play with, and can run multiple apps simultaneously etc.

--HEx 07:22, 5 May 2007 (CEST)

Size

This is the real problem. A recent bzipped article-only dump of enwiki comes in at 2.1Gb. Encyclopodia's download seems to be about 1.7Gb. It seems likely that even with some optimization, a full copy of wikipedia is going to be over 1Gb. Thus it would seem that a complete copy is probably going to be impractical for most people (assuming they want to store other things on their Neo too), so it would be worth finding out what bits can be discarded with relatively little loss.

On the compression front, lzma would seem to be the way to go. Clearly the input needs to be divided into blocks for random access, but the choice of which articles go into which block I think could affect the compression ratio greatly.

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Wishes warning! This article or section documents one or more OpenMoko Wish List items, the features described here may or may not be implemented in the future.

A local copy of wikipedia that you can browse anywhere without incurring bandwidth costs. It's already been done for the iPod (see encyclopodia), but I think we can do better on the Neo. For starters, it has a much nicer screen, and a real UI toolkit to play with, and can run multiple apps simultaneously etc.

--HEx 07:22, 5 May 2007 (CEST)

Size

This is the real problem. A recent bzipped article-only dump of enwiki comes in at 2.1Gb. Encyclopodia's download seems to be about 1.7Gb. It seems likely that even with some optimization, a full copy of wikipedia is going to be over 1Gb. Thus it would seem that a complete copy is probably going to be impractical for most people (assuming they want to store other things on their Neo too), so it would be worth finding out what bits can be discarded with relatively little loss.

On the compression front, lzma would seem to be the way to go. Clearly the input needs to be divided into blocks for random access, but the choice of which articles go into which block I think could affect the compression ratio greatly.