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I've been using HTTPS Wikipedia for years. It's great to see them make it the default. But considering what Wikipedia is, users wanting increased privacy coul
by jingo 13y ago
I've been using HTTPS Wikipedia for years. It's great to see them make it the default.
But considering what Wikipedia is, users wanting increased privacy could just download a copy of the encyclopedia and do their searches offline. Wikimedia makes data dumps of their user-generated content (UGC) available to the public. (Don't you wish all mega-websites relying on UGC did that?)
There was a time before the internet when we used volumes of paper bound encyclopedias. These were not written by laypeople and they were not free. Few people owned their own set of volumes of Brittanica's encyclopedia. They used someone else's copy, e.g., a library's.
But imagine if Brittanica offered _free_ copies of their encyclopedia that could somehow fit in your pocket (as is possible now through digitization and Wikipedia).
Would you continue to use a copy belonging to someone else everytime you had to look something up? Why wouldn't you obtain a copy for yourself?
What if...
Wikipedia's data dumps were small enough.
Wikipedia content was, overall, static enough.
Storage was cheap enough.
Download speeds were fast enough.
And you could get your very own copy of the encyclopedia.
Compared to the speed, reliability and privacy of offline reading, grabbing specific articles piecemeal via HTTPS simply cannot compare.
See OpenMoko's WikiReader as an example implementation. It's on Github.
- generj 13y agoThe only possible disadvantage is information about rapidly changing world events (for which Wikipedia isn't the best resource, but still). English Wikipedia dumps are only run on a monthly basis. Images are much more resource intensive, but if text only is sufficient then the average user can download the compressed Wikipedia dumps in less than 2 days. Please use torrents to reduce the load on Wikimedia's servers and to increase download speed: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#enwiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#enwiki I keep a backup on an external hard-drive, in case of apocalypse or censorship (same thing). Nobody can take away my list of Scrubs episodes.
- indrax 13y agohttp://kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
- hnha 13y agoI bought a 70$ tablet just as my hitchhiker's guide. Put wikipedia en, fr and es on a SD card plus various other smaller wikis. I recommend http://aarddict.org/ http://aarddict.org/ as FOSS win/Linux/Android/etc reader. The only problem is that images need massive space. I hope some technological advances will enable us to include all of them in wiki dumps soon.