[csmuk]

This makes me wonder why we couldn't have a DVCS with encyclopaedia content in it. That would be easy to "pull" offline and update regularly and "push" back up with changes. It'd be easier to distribute content and version it as well. Oh and patch queues could be used to review and edit content.

A local HTTP service or desktop app, DVCS and indexer would do a fine job of this.

[arthulia]

I think it's just not feasible/useful for most people. The latest copy of Wikipedia is 42GB, and that's not including images or earlier revisions.

[csmuk]

To be honest, a lot of wikipedia is crap.

An abridged version would be a couple of gigabytes perhaps which isn't beyond the realm of possibility. That'd fit nicely on a smart phone/tablet and could be taken somewhere with less than adequate data connections (read most places on this planet).

[adrianN]

Good luck with getting the editors to agree which parts are crap.

[qznc]

You can get the page view logs. You can filter out most of the garbage that way.

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/

[tommorris]

Justin Bieber: 594,757 views in the last month.

Origin of birds: 8,506 in the last month.

Ogden L. Mills (secretary of the US Treasury under Herbert Hoover): 399 views in the last month.

What is in the public interest is not the same as what the public show an interest in. Page views won't necessarily help you filter Wikipedia...

[qznc]

With filtering I was thinking about discarding everything with less then 10 views. I consider all of your examples relevant. Getting rid of pages like "Wikipeida_suxxxs" is the first step.

[qznc]

For a while I had a 300MB text-only Wikipedia on my (Symbian) phone. Found most of the stuff I looked up. For example, I remember browsing some cocktail recipes.