Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone

blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"

Nothing new

[Hrshgn]

This is nothing new. Wikipedia has been available for several years now in MDict format: http://www.octopus-studio.com/product.en.htm [octopus-studio.com]

Better

[Anonymous Coward]

And for those preferring accuracy and editorial responsibility :

http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/08/02/27/britannica.on.iphone/

Re:Nice!

[Starayo]

The filesize of the app is about 2GB. Pretty amazing!

I'd be grabbing it right now if I didn't only have ~350MB of free space left on my iPhone...

Would be a great app for iPod Touch users.

Wikibooks is for how-to guides

[tepples]

Hell, I was flipping through an encyclopedia from the 40's, and under "Dynamite", it had detailed instructions on how to MAKE it yourself

Wikipedia doesn't have how-to guides. If you want that, use Wikibooks.

Re:Profits

[twoshortplanks]

He is; It's detailed on the info for the app in iTunes. Since you need iTunes to read that, I'll simply post a screenshot: http://img.skitch.com/20090703-e7kkm8i7f4wdq9ir92td898wr3.jpg [skitch.com] (skitch may eventually delete that image after a while...)

Re:Nothing new

[tomthepom]

You're not looking hard enough [legaltorrents.com]. Wikipedia has also been available in Tomeraider [tomeraider.com] format for a while now.

Warning: 3 majors problem with this app.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought this application 6 months ago and there are 3 majors problems with it:
1) The search function is broken because you need to type the exact word (prefix)
2) This is plain text: no pictures and no tables so most articles with "list" are useless
3) No update mechanism so the dump used will be outdated soon.

Re:Nice!

[SuperKendall]

So stick a bigger SD card in it already.

He can't, can you just loan him your mobile SD capable device that can run the app?

Oh that's right...

Just use the mobile-formatted version

[daemonenwind]

try this link from your mobile phone:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/ [wapedia.mobi]

That way you get the whole thing, up-to-date, and with no trouble or major memory usage.