No, not the project to print Wikipedia articles -- although the name conflict may be a problem -- I'm talking about the exciting new portable offline reader from OpenMoko.

These images show you the very latest in industrial design, accomplished by time-travelling back to the mid-80s.
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Note that Japanesearchitect is rendered as a single word. Yes, this is from the official website.

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Wikireader has removed all of those pesky notices that appear on the live article, like:
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Now you have offline acces to such sentences as:"It is one of the most famous events in Germany and the world's largest fair, with some six million people attending every year, and is an enjoyable event with an important part of Bavarian culture". Wow. They picked this article for the official media shots.

Believe it or not, it does not appear to distinguish between header levels and renders all section titles simply as bold text. No screenshots on the official site show this, however, so feel free to tell me I'm wrong. (I'm not)

It dawns on me that an application like this makes it very important for Jimbo that he does not implement flagged revisions until Wikia are in a position to invent an application. Indeed it is probably indicative of Jimbo's lack of entrepreneurial flair that even with being focused on Wikipedia, he has no solution other than advertising to cash in - and look how successful he has been with that on Wikia.

With flagged revisions, something like WikiReader has a fighting chance of producing versions without the usual collection of unmentionables dangling around at any particular point in time (e.g. Google demonstrates the problem). It has the potential to make it easy for third parties to take the content without too many concerns of collecting the obvious vandalism. Perhaps that is why the WMF have been dragging their knuckles?

Be interesting to know what filtering the WikiReader guys have put in to remove the questionable, potentially unlawful material. The chances are that they have dealt with the obvious, but will be blissfully unaware that they are republishing a libel machine without the benefit of 230c.

You have to ask? Of course it is.


It appears that they have done almost no other filtering of the raw text--just reformatting to make it easier to display on this gadget's tiny, cheap LCD; and blocking the "non kid friendly" articles. Not a word about removing or fixing vandalized material. "Never touched by human hands."

If they really wanted to "make a difference", they would put out the SD memory card version of WP separately, maybe with a reader app to run on cellphones. There is already a free Windows app to do that.

At least they give Sanger some credit.....