The Longest Now

Offline wikireaders have been around for over a decade in various forms, but still it seems few of them are really excellent.  (If you’re interested in such things, I have a mailing list for you…) At OLPC I’ve worked on various ways of sharing content with groups of students who are offline, and last year Chris Ball and Wade Brainerd built a WikiBrowse application, based on Patrick Collison’s iPhone Wikipedia app, that has been downloaded by 400,000 children and teachers in English and Spanish.  This was the first reader to store a compressed dump, expanding pages as they are read, and including a few images.  But it still doesn’t allow you to easily compile your own version of WikiBrowse based on your preferred title list, and it doesn’t support full-text search or offline editing.

Now Pascal Martin of Linterweb and Wikiwix fame has released a new product : Okawix, the engine behind a new DVD snapshot of wikipedia; it is now linked from download.wikimedia.org.  You can reads more about it on their Wikiwix blog.  This could be the foundation for a fully functional Wikipedia on a Stick project, with editing and commentary, as the WikiStick hackers from Taiwan envisioned a couple of years ago.  See for yourself!