The last mile wikipedia launches
moulin, the brainchild of Geekcorps volunteers Frederic Renet and Renaud Gaudin, started off as a side project of Geekcorps’ Last Mile Initiative. Frederic and Renaud quickly developed an initial prototype of the system to run on a Nokia 770. Excited by the potential of making Wikipedia more widely accessible, Renaud volunteered for a second tour with Geekcorps and developed the current version of moulin which can be run off a CD.
Congrats to Geekcorps on developing a 400,000+ article no-images version of the wikipedia that fits snugly into a CD. The project is called moulin. I think the approach is audaciously simple, useful and humanitarian. And obviously lo-bandwidth friendly, once you’ve got a copy. Way to go!
Any details on the offline Wikipedia for the Nokia 770?
I don’t actually have any idea. And I don’t really understand why the Nokia 770 would be a good choice as a platform (proprietary, expensive). I guess maybe it just has plenty of storage for local content? *Any* phone should be able to browse the content online given an appropriate mobile stylesheet. If you dont have enough bandwidth for web browsing on your phone (that’s understandable) then it seems that you should still be able to store it on any standard flash memory. The specs on the nokia are here: http://europe.nokia.com/A4145105
It seems that the nokia is part of a larger kiosk setup descibed here: http://www.geekcorps.org/2006/11/cybertigi-extending-ict-servic/
.. but I am still confused why it is a good choice. (I trust geekcorps to know what they’re doing though :)
I think it also might have something to do with the sdictionary format: http://sdict.com/en/wikipedia.php
The Nokia 770 or it’s successor the N800 are really good hardware plate-forme. For $300 (N800) or $140(N700) you have a really good screen, with high resolution (800×480), a full linux computer, it’s opensource. The dev environment called Maemo is really easy to use and you can code and debug on your PC.
Integrated battery means you can just plug a 10W solar panel and have it running all day.
And Chris, yes any phone can browse online content. But phone connection are either not available or overly expensive for the people. All the idea of moulin wiki is to have the content available off line.
And it’s not related to the cybertigi project. Nokia were used in a pilot but were replaced by simple USB flash disk after.
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