German Wikipedia DVD on P2P networks

April 11, 2005 The German Wikipedia DVD is a popular item on European FTP sites.

The DVD project with Directmedia publishing GmbH was built from the March 3, 2005 database archive, and has been packaged as ISO image files to be made available online. When the news was reported @ heise online, FTP requests to the University of Erlangen quickly overloaded the 622mbit connection server. The average load is still above 482.39 compared to 20 before the announcement.

In the afternoon, the FTP server Belnet joined in also hosting these files which can also be downloaded by using the peer-to-peer file transfer software Bittorrent.

The DVD image is 2.7 Gigabytes in size, and includes browsing software for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The download is large, but is also available from DirectMedia for about €10 on DVD - although their initial printing of 10,000 sold out within 3 days.

Stimulated by the success of this DVD project, several English news services have raised the question of when an English DVD of Wikipedia will be available.

Related News

 * Deutsche Wikipedia-DVD im Netz 11.4.2005