Use of Wikipedia content off the web

Folks,

  I recently (Nov 2003) discovered wikipedia - a superb resource.

  I have even done a couple of minor edits to see how it works.

  I have a possibly common request, which is to be able to store
  wikipedia content outside of the wikipedia servers.

  This appears to be the right forum to discuss this ...
  [BTW: the mailman web interface for subscription is broken ..]

  I am working on an Internet access project in South Africa -

  	http://wizzy.org.za/

  To provide Email and web content in a country like South Africa,
  there is a different set of contraints compared to the first world,
  the main one being the cost of the phone call to the ISP.

  My novel solution is to use UUCP for data delivery. This enables
  me to use overnight dialup (a cheap rate billing option for Telkom,
  the monopoly wireline provider in this country) for email, and
  web scrapes that back-fill a web cache on the school LAN.

  The phone line is therefore not used during the day - all content
  is served locally. http content is served from a wwwoffle cache.

  The school administrator approves web scrapes, to a varying depth,
  and these are fetched via UUCP.

  Another delivery option is physical carriage of the same UUCP data
  using a USB memory stick. This allows schools without telephone
  infrastructure to access web and email.

  Well - apart from feeble scrapes of part of wikipedias content -
  you can see that wikipedia is essentially offline for students.

  Any serious attempt to give them access seems to involve duplication
  of the wikipedia database locally, and probably means that local
  edits will be ignored.

  Does anyone have any constructive suggestions for a solution ?

  I do not mind dropping down a whole computer on their network
  to handle wikipedia. However, I see the sticky issue as
  licensing wikimedia content offsite.

Cheers,      Andy!

http://wizzy.org.za/