Insofar, the game-changing Wikipedia has been a phenomenon that required you to have access to the Internet. This did not limit possibilities, but allowed you to keep up-to-date. However, there are those who would prefer to use it without having that kind of connectivity. This is early, but now it's possible.
You have an application that works on Win32/64 or GNU/Linux-32/64. The core is written with Java, this would seem to have facilitated their faster dual-platform support and hence a prudent choice. I appreciate their not having stuck to mingw by first having had a native GNU/Linux application which would permit them to uniformly tune user-experience on multiple platforms.
Click the link above if you're among the impatient lot, and would rather dive right in and find out what it is.
For more details, you'll have to continue reading.
The basic installation is 49.1 MBytes and does not come with any encyclopaedic information. It comes with the independent engine that can thereafter install packages of data from different Wikipedia sites and update them when you are online.
The "Simple Wiki" is a 100MByte (less than that for now) payload that you can install to bootstrap and test the application.
Both Installation and Uninstallation can be done better. This is an open source project and we can contribute to it making it work better. Here are the first few items to be ironed out:
- Pausing downloads during installation of Wikipedia content [not yet available]
- Uninstalling selected content [not yet available]
- Selective installation of categories of content [not yet available]
- Printing content [not yet available]
- Installers to be more friendly/setup-wizard styled [improvements possible]
If you have more on them, please keep the comments rolling, but I find this a nice step in the education-scape especially of the surrounding regions.
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