Bring The Entire Wikipedia Database To Your iPod Touch (and iPhone) For Use Offline!

Something amazing has hit the iPod Touch front. One team calls it the iPhonePedia.app. The other, simply Wikipedia.app.

That’s right. There are actually two application versions of Wikipedia.com’s database that are available for the iPod Touch (and iPhone, of course).

One huge difference between the two is the size of the download. Wikipedia.app will require ~2GB’s of space, while the iPhonePedia.app will only consume an astonishing ~150MB’s!

Update (from Patrick [starter of Wikipedia.app] on Jan 4th, 2008)

…the iPhonePedia app needs you to download a dump from the main Wikipedia servers in addition to their 150MB file — so you end up
with 3.1GB of stuff (not 150MB). Wikipedia.app (the one I wrote 🙂 needs a little under 2GB (keeping this size down was one of the big
goals when developing it).

Here’s the basics on Wikipedia.app

What: An offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I wanted to write an iPhone app over Christmas, and so hacked this together during the break.

Why: It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain. You have an iPod Touch.

Size: It’ll consume about a quarter of your iPhone’s storage—the app, indexes and dumps are almost exactly 2GB together.

Completenes: This still has a lot of rough edges. Some articles can’t be opened, and it’s not too hard to crash the app.

Other: There’s also a mongrel-based ruby server for offline browsing on a PC (was used for debug during development). See sh/server in the source distribution. No screenshots yet.

Download

Application: Wikipedia.zip

Dump: enwiki-20071018-iphone.tar

Source: wikipedia-iphone-0.1.tar.bz2 (GPL)

Installation

Put the app in /Applications. Use something like Customize.app to get it onto your springboard. Untar the dump, and put the contents at /var/root/wp. If using Windows, check out the in-depth Windows installation instructions contributed by rebelxtnut.

Here’s the basics on iPhonePedia.app

iPhonePedia is a quite terrible name but summarizes it well: this project allows to run a local wikipedia database on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

You may be wondering what the hell is the point of wasting precious iPhone space for something you can just access onlie. Well, I personally don’t really see any, but I have an iPod Touch, hence the need for something offline and the smaller worries about disk space!

Check the following pages to know:

• FeaturesList
• ScreenShots
• HowItWorks
• InstallationInstructions
• ThankYou
• AlternativeSolutions
• DataFiles

Sources:

– (iPhonePedia.app) http://trac2.assembla.com/iPhonePedia/wiki/FeaturesList
– (Wikipedia.app) http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/

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