The Wikipedia Selection is a DVD selection of articles taken from Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, a free online encyclopedia, and was first produced in April 2006. There have been two major revisions since then, the 2007 version in April 2007 and the 2008/9 version in October 2008. It was the first available English language CD version of Wikipedia. The disc is produced by the charity SOS Children

SOS Children's Villages UK

SOS Children's Villages UK is an autonomous charity based in Cambridge in the United Kingdom and part of the international group SOS Children's Villages, the largest international charity group dedicated to the care of orphaned and abandoned children...

.

The DVD's content totals twenty million words and 34,000 images, equivalent to a twenty volume encyclopaedia. The DVD contained 5,500+ articles of particular interest to schools or children and is sorted by UK National Curriculum subjects (for example; Art, Citizenship, Geography, Mathematics and so on). The articles were manually selected from the English Wikipedia by volunteers working for SOS Children, checked for suitability for children and cleaned by hand and script. This additional step helps overcome what are perceived by educators as the problems with Wikipedia.

Distribution

Distribution has been by download on BitTorrent peer to peer network, and by free DVD from the charity offices. Partnerships with the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Hole in the Wall have seen it distributed in South Africa and India as well as copies being available globally via the offices of SOS Children UK's umbrella organisation, SOS Children's Villages

SOS Children's Villages

SOS Children's Villages is an independent, non-governmental international development organisation which has been working to meet the needs and protect the interests and rights of children since 1949. It was founded by Hermann Gmeiner in Imst, Austria...

 worldwide.
Although the project is mainly offline, the online browsable version at http://schools-wikipedia.org gets around 7000 unique IP visitors a day rising to over 20,000 in the run up to new editions. There is also a Plucker database version of the 2007 version to carry on an SD card for Palm Pilot.

Wiki to CD transition changes

Because this distribution was not initially an official Wikimedia project, some changes had to be made for legal reasons.

The logo

The Wikipedia puzzle-globe logo was not included in the 2006 edition as SOS Children did not have permission to use it. Permission has since been granted and subsequent editions uses the Wikipedia logo.

Content changes

The only content added was a small box notice on about 130 pages which have a particular relevance to SOS Children (e.g. many of the 125 countries where SOS works).

Disclaimer

In addition to the Wikipedia General Disclaimer, the 2006 CD carries the following notice:
The 2008/9 release has a much more comprehensive disclaimer:

Relationship with official Wikipedia releases

Although the CD selection was produced outside of Wikimedia, the project served as proof of concept for upcoming official releases of Wikipedia on hard copy as well as their distribution and the conversion of online to offline articles.

"Official" Wikimedia releases will use the naming pattern "Wikipedia Release Version [...]" to avoid confusion with the SOS Children's versions which will be named [date]-Wikipedia-CD-Selection.

External links

• BBC article
• 2007 Wikipedia Selection