Offline Wikipedia - Random Wednesday

Hey all my dear readers! :D It's 8th August today, Random Wednesday at my blog. A Bright Good Morning to all of you! :) Oh why did I mention the date? Well, my Birthday is tomorrow, 9th August! :D So just making a note here to tell you all that! LOL! :D



So you all must have already read the title of the post? Yes! I am about to talk about Wikipedia, the one Big Online Free Encyclopedia, that needs no Introduction, right? :) But still, I need to make my post a little bit big right?! Hahahaha! SO I am ought to add some information (which might seem rudimentary since we all know Wikipedia!, but I would try to keep it short, okay? :) ).

So, on Monday I received this month's Digit Magazine. In the DVDs that come with the magazine, one had nothing but Offline Wikipedia. A super-compressed file of size around 7.7 GB which would decompress to 20 GB! Yes you read that right! :) I was quite amazed and wanted to install it right away. Though I have a 3 TB Hard Disk, still I became reluctant to install it since I like using Wikipedia online! :) I am connected to internet most of the time, and thus I like going online to check any Wiki article.

But to those who are not always connected to Internet, or love to use their computer to store a lot of info, would just love this idea of Offline Wikipedia. Before writing this article, I searched on the Internet about this Offline Wikipedia, since Digit won't be the only generous firm in the world for the customers to get this superb thing, right? And yes! I were right! LOL! :D I found an official Wikipedia page about this Offline Wikipedia, and it's a lengthy article. Although lengthy, this article is full of superb info.

Now you must be wondering that this article would only have information about the offline Wikipedia, but wait! a clever reader would see a lot of interesting info in the article. To preach this idea of an offline free encyclopedia( Do you remember the Microsoft Encarta? Paid Encyclopedia? I bought it's 2005 version when it was released, and I just loved it, so you have an idea why this free Encyclopedia thing is being featured today at my blog? I love Encyclopedias! :D ), Wikipedia has added a lot of information about Operating Systems and File Systems and development related to Computers(Software level, of course!). This makes the article altogether a great one, just like most of the Wikipedia ones! :)

Here is the link to that article. The article also has the download links in different languages of the Wiki Dumps(Offline content of Wikipedia), as they call it.

Now it's time for some Info about Wikipedia, from Wikipedia! LOL! :D

Wikipedia is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 22 million articles (over 4 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of August 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.

The policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view.
Yeah, maybe that's why some people call Wikipedia to be censored Encyclopedia. I love Wikipedia, though since people can add their articles and once reviewed, they are completely approved on Wikipedia, some articles are nothing but mere advertisements. But what's Wikipedia doing in that regard? Well, it ads a line in the starting that states that this article seems to be an advertisement! LOL! :D

Anyways, I hope you people find this Offline Wikipedia a worthy thing. Have fun, keep smiling and all comments and suggestions are welcomed always! :)
Good Day! :D