Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on October 24, 2008Today, the latest edition of the Wikipedia school edition has been released by SOS Children’s Villages, a charity organization that aims to help orphans and vulnerable children worldwide. The 08/09 edition can be downloaded for free, via BitTorrent only, and comprises over 5500 hand-picked educational articles aimed at helping schools to enhance their curriculum.
This year’s Wikipedia edition for schools is the largest since the project started back in 2006. With 34,000 images and 20 million words, it is comparable to a twenty volume encyclopedia captured on a single DVD.
Without a doubt, it is the most successful “checked content” project based on the English Wikipedia, used by hundreds of schools in first and third world countries. The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles – all based around the UK curriculum with an absence of adult content – it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.
To save on resources, Wikipedia for schools is only available online via BitTorrent, which practically reduces the charity’s distribution costs to zero. SOS Children CEO Andrew Cates, who is a Wikipedia administrator himself, said that they have no other choice than to use BitTorrent, since the 2.9 GB download would crush their server.
“BitTorrent was a bit disappointing in that it got us the only substantial criticisms we received online,” Cates said in an interview with Wikinews. “A lot of people find it too much effort to use. However for the period we offered a straight http: download we had huge problems with spiders eating vast bandwidth.”
“As per last year therefore our main two channels will be free download by BitTorrent and mailing the DVDs free all over the world. At a pinch we will (as before) put straight copies up for individuals who cannot get it any other way, and we have some copies on memory sticks for on distributors,” Cates added.
The .torrent file is available for download on the SOS Children’s Villages website. For those who don’t want to install a BitTorrent client, the DVD can also be downloaded from any web browser with BitLet.
A final word of advice from SOS Children’s Villages: “It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished.”
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46 Responses
I hope someone from Comcast is reading this.
niice 1
who would’ve known amazonaws.com is working as the traker
yea this is cool ,i’ll be seeding
I will most certainly seed this one a tad extra, both when it comes to time and speed.
Very cool project, will try to do my part in seeding.
Interesting that it only helps to keep utorrent running. oh well.
But if it’s on a DVD, how can we change it to say the elephant population has tripled? =^P
But really, this sounds like an awesome project and I’ll participate in the seeding endevor, BT for the legal distribution win!
“Without a doubt, it is the most successful ‘checked content’ project based on the English Wikipedia”
That is a nice fact, and ensures that I’m going to use this myself in my school projects, and keep seeding while I’m doing so.
Added it to my seedbox, don’t mind donating some bandwidth to a good cause :)
if bittorrent wasn’t blocked for me, I’d seed :(
233kb seems large for a torrentfile, any explanation?
@7: Such illiteracy on this age is what brings your stupidity up front. Interesting that it keeps Utorrent running? hmm! first of all you can close the program or kill the process or stop sharing this torrent whenever you feel like it. Secondly, this is a voluntary action. I have certainly downloaded and the torrent and am seeding this. Obviously your logic (or lack thereof) ensures that the word “community” is out of existence. @12: A torrent file being a large torrent has many causes. For one, if you packed a lot of files and put them all inside a torrent, it would be something that works like a book with many chapters. The more chapters (files) there are in a book, the bigger the index and table of contents might be (the torrent file itself). Similarly the same thing happens with trackers and it depends on the information contained within the torrent file. It is indeed impressive for a torrent file, though most torrents oscillate between 3 k or less to probably this size or more. Anyway, I really like that this is proof to the ridiculous “media” and governments like that of the U. S, and more so in the UK and Canada to show that torrent and filesharing do not mean the cause for the “economy going down the drain” (so that then some kind of so called politician acting on THEIR FAVOR not THE PEOPLE’S INTEREST turns on the tv, watches the situation like a comic movie and then gets much income from all the taxes people pay). Geez, so much for preventing biassed and discriminatory commentary on anything, even at schools and colleges, and look at this… paradice for prejudice and hypocrisy all the way. I would really like these “anti-piracy” organizations or whatever they’d like to be called to BACK IT UP. Where are the losses the most? since when, and from where are these prizes obtained? yet HOW do you get the money to sue INDEFINITELY and all the campaigning? have you too noticed how the music on the radio is changing once every 4 months? and even tunes from last year’s shows get still played? HMM! that also tells me a lot of other things. But I am getting off topic here. Was just emphasizing my ppoint. Come on, it doesn’t take a genius to figure all of this out. I would love to see more educational and resourceful things like these in the future. Perhaps i will even implement my own too and torrents are the first stop. Perhaps too, if the media hadn’t been so biassed over file sharing and torrents such kind of huge losses (also known as pathetic imaginary losses, invented numbers) would not have occurred and it wouldn’t be so popular. But if you see the missing logic here is where everything falls into place: Now that this is instigating more things and “causing more trouble”, more people will be downloading things online and torrents are pretty much prevailing right now, whether these people like it or NOT. Why? Because by advertising things so much the media crewed itself over yet ONCE MORE and will keep doing so indefinitely.
will have to download and seed this, current stats are around 30 GB d/ and 170 GB u/l :)
Holy unnecessary words batman. Pretty sure #7 was making a joke that only the utorrent application would help out, and for some reason others, like deluge, ktorrent, etc, would not.
Someone needs to seriously chill and maybe take a trip to boobdex or something.
@13
Great use of paragraphs.
I love this shit.. THIS IS THE POWER OF BITTORRENT.
To the people who say its too difficult to use.. YOU. ARE. AN. IDIOT.
Grow a brain or stop breathing.. ignorance is not an excuse.
Notice the part where it says.. DISTRIBUTION COST TO ZERO. Yes ZERO. Education for FREE, for the COMMON GOOD. No F*CKING executives, no restrictions, no PROFIT.
THIS IS what the future could be if you retards would embrace this incredible technology.
^ ^ ^
What he said =)
@15 — hahaha, yeah.
lol @ 13
Is this like… *.html pages?
its strange, every time I try and get one of these “made available” legal distribution torrents My Ip filter gets lit up within minutes by government, corporations and military? How many of you downloaded this and had no idea these kind of peers are possibly in your swarm.
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 216.174.135.2 was in range Government of Saskatchewan Communitynet
=================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 38.119.107.110 was in range Performance Systems International-ed2k/ap2p
===========================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 129.141.151.209 was in range 85 MISSION SUPPORT SQUADRON/SCSN
=======================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 20.191.150.24 was in range Computer Sciences Corporation
==================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 165.240.22.82 was in range imported inetnum object for DTQ
==================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 134.223.47.207 was in range Northrop Grumman Corp
==================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 51.228.33.80 was in range Department of Social Security of UK
=======================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 142.31.117.97 was in range British Columbia Provincial Government
===============================
[schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz] 55.110.166.89 was in range DoD Network Information Center
this was within a matter of minutes after starting the transfer. As you can see filesharers arent necessairly the only people curious about this torrent.
A school edition of Wikipedia? Are you kidding me? Wikipedia is edited and controlled by a bunch of Fascist idiots. What a joke.
Jiff
http://www.online-privacy.cz.tc
“its strange, every time I try and get one of these “made available” legal distribution torrents My Ip filter gets lit up within minutes by government, corporations and military? How many of you downloaded this and had no idea these kind of peers are possibly in your swarm.”
IP filters are not accurate.
“A school edition of Wikipedia? Are you kidding me? Wikipedia is edited and controlled by a bunch of Fascist idiots. What a joke.”
Wikipedia is edited by a bunch of people. A *lot* of people. Different people.
Something for the benefit of mankind? NO , we must SUE SUE SUE!
I’m currently downloading and will be seeding for a long time. Long live Wikipedia and Bittorrent!
Wow, this torrent is fast. I’m downloading at 1386.9KB/s and uploading at 1500KB/s! I’m gonna seed for a long time… support bittorrent and show that it CAN be used for perfectly legal purposes!
@ 23
“The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles… it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.”
LEARN the difference of internet and intranets, you dumb fuck. Besides the articles being hand picked! I’m sure they didn’t include articles lacking sources or just any random articles.
That’s just awesome that the SOS Children’s villages have access to wikipedia now. I have been to an SOS Children’s village and that is the best form of foster care I have ever seen.
peer guardian showing just about everyone having a sniff at this….
@17
Thats what the internet is for
DUHHH
It IS fast. I’ll be seeding this for a while ^^
I extracted with 7-Zip and got a tar file. Tried to open it with 7-zip and it didn’t open. Any help?
That is interesting to learn that some people are too lazy to use bittorrent, and complain about it.
“peer guardian showing just about everyone having a sniff at this….”
It’s called overzealous blocklists
for some reason I just see connection error when trying to download this.
yes and JW’s unhelpful attitude above, and the prodigious amounts of pornography one encounters when doing a search, as well as the serious problems people bring on when using LimeWire, and understandable issues and complications around using P2P clients, are some good reasons people are confused by bittorrent type solutions.
great idea!
@17
You make a good point but don’t call them retards because that couldn’t be more far off. They are greedy worthless pigs who disregard the theory that knowledge is free.
@22
Is that a good thing or not?
This is a good example for copyright organizations and operators, who slows down p2p traffic, that p2p technology/programs like BitTorrent can be also used for completely legal use. But I think, that they will never understand (or want to understand) it :(.
Please note that I’m not the same “Anonymous” than above.
You commie scum bags!
Meh, why pack it? They should have just made a torrent of the ISO.
Who cares?
4 GB seeded, still seeding!
As of right now (oct 26), I’ve seeded a total of 50.95GB on this torrent so far, and I’ll continue to seed for a few more months.
i have just started to download , i will seed it for really long time , anything for a good cause :)
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