Wikipedia On CD?

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Doesn’t putting a site like Wikipedia on to a CD sort of defeat the purpose? I’m not saying anything is wrong with the idea, it just seems to run counter to the whole concept of an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. What do you guys think? Thanks to GJSNeptune for the linkage.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, a compact disc collection of around 2,000 articles from the English Wikipedia. Articles were chosen based on criteria for quality and importance set by the Wikipedia community. Topics covered include, among others, geography, arts, literature, science, history, and natural sciences.
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getting it from the torrent now, pretty cool idea. There are definitely times when an offline version is preferred (damn you comcast cable!). Same reason I keep a copy of Encarta around.
 
I could see how this could be useful in those cases where you want some quick facts but you don't have any way to access the net.

However, at a little over 2000 articles, I doubt it would be very useful for what I primarily use Wikipedia for - useless trivia in random articles dealing with cartoons or video games or comics...
 
I love wikipedia. More usefull to me than Google these days.

Downloading now. It's worth a look!

Also gives me a chance to try out the Download Station built into my QNAP TS-201 NAS. I just plug in the address, and away it goes. Can even shut the computer down afterwards.
 
It doesn't defeat the purpose because apparently the things included are older subjects that are completely accurate and don't change. It does make for a nice offline reference however.
 
wikipedia rocks. There have been several times where an offline copy would have been appreciated.
 
Cool, I'm glad you guys find it useful.

I'm like bashPenguin and use Wikipedia for all things irrelevent so the CD seemed like a bad idea to me.
 
I think there's a downloadable Wikipedia (although I dunno if it is official or not) for the PocketPC, there's a reduced size version which is under 100mb I think, and a full size version which is around 1GB or so.

I saw it somewhere, but I don't have a PPC, so I wouldn't know exactly what it is called
 
Oh yeah and also, I think there was something to synchronize what you already install to the current databases. Either that or there were update packages every few weeks or so
 
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