Sunday, August 05, 2007

Project 'moulin' to help unconnected world with offline Wikipedia

Taipei, Aug. 4 (CNA) As most people are happy surfing Wikipedia, one of the most popular online reference Web sites, some people have been trying to deliver an "offline Wikipedia" to the developing countries and the "unconnected part of the world". One of them is French programmer Renaud Gaudin, who is working for the purpose under a project named "moulin."

The "moulin, " which means windmill in French, attempts to improve the access to basic information and reference material in developing countries by making it possible to access Wikipedia offline, said Gaudin Saturday in a seminar of Wikimania 2007, an annual Wikimedia conference which is being held in Taipei.

"Basically, moulin is a fully interactive, offline version of the entire Wikipedia, without pictures, on a CD, " said the French programmer who based in West African country Mali as an non-government organization volunteer.

The project is the brainchild of Gaudin and Frederic Renet, who realized that while many organizations focused on bringing computer to people in developing countries, few have paid attention to making content available for people in those places that do not have access to the Internet.

"Wikipedia has been also developing a project called 'Wikipedia on DVD', a CD collection of around 2,000 Wikipedia articles, but we want to do more than that. We wanted to have the full Wikipedia in the CD because people in Africa don't know about too many things, " said Gaudin.

The current French version moulin contains around 450,000 Wikipedia articles, he said.

Moulin started off as a side project of Geekcorps Mali, an NGO Gaudin worked for. The initial prototype of the system ran on Nokia 770, a portable internet tablet. Gaudin later rewrote the software and developed the current version of moulin which can be run off a CD before volunteering for his second tour to Mali.

Gaudin, who is now developing the software on his own with several friends volunteering in developing the software in different languages, said he talked to organizations and projects, such as OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), for collaboration.

"OLPC said it would develop a system of its own since the project targeted for children and did not need the whole Wikipedia, " he said.

The biggest problem for Gaudin right now is the lack of distribution power and funding, although it did receive funding from USAID. Without enough money, it's difficlut to distribute the French version CDs across West Africa, he said.

Gaudin, who visits Taiwan for the first time, is still optimistic, saying he plans to develop the pocket device version of moulin and set up a distribution network in Africa. He also looks forward to collaborating with people in other countries.