Most of us have used Wikipedia to find out or consult some information, for all those cases we have logically used the Internet, but what if we wanted to find out some current topic and we did not have Internet? o How will students from countries with few resources be able to consult current issues without Internet?
Well, for this purpose WikiReader was created, the creators describe the need for the tool in the following way:
Why Take Wikipedia Offline?
Because how can knowledge equal freedom
if people need a modem to get it?
People don’t go to Wikipedia because they want to be on the Internet; they go there because they want to find answers and discover new questions. Of course, the best answers never end in themselves. They raise our curiosity and lead us down new avenues. They don’t stop conversations but, rather, sustain them. Similarly, each WikiReader experience is the beginning of something new. With more than three million interconnected articles in a completely offline, handheld package, the WikiReader is discovery, investigation, entertainment, and inspiration all rolled into one. In keeping with Wikipedia’s stated goal of:
“Providing a free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet.”
It has a touch screen that accommodates international keyboards and uses widely available AAA batteries. And since the WikiReader never requires an Internet connection, it can deliver all of this to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Turning a WikiReader on is easy. Turning it off is a different story.
With WikiReader, we can also check different types of Wikis, such as WikiHow, Wikiquote and Wiktionary. All this content was mainly in English but had versions in different languages.
All the code used in this project can be seen and used by GitHub since it is open source, WikiReader has the following specifications:
The biggest limitation is its lack of ability to show images, which in some cases, such as mathematics is important for the explanation of mathematical formulas.
If you want to know more about this project, you can enter the page http://thewikireader.com
