Press releases/German Wikipedia available on DVD

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, now available on DVD
Spurred by the success of its CD distribution of the German Wikipedia in autumn 2004, the publishing house Directmedia Publishing, with the support of the Wikipedia community, has published an updated DVD version now. It contains a snapshot of the German-language Wikipedia from March 3, 2005, with over 200.000 articles. The DVD runs under Windows, Linux and Macintosh, and contains images of the encyclopedia for PDAs and modern cellular phones.

A CD reader is included, making it possible to quickly access off-line Wikipedia, with no software to be installed. The package is titled "Wikipedia. Spring 2005" and can be found in bookstores. One euro of every purchase goes to Wikimedia Deutschland, society for the promotion of free knowledge -- the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. "We are pleased about the off-line version, because with the DVD release still more people will benefit from the free knowledge of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia spokesman Arne Klempert. It is the goal of Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization behind the free encyclopedia, to make the knowledge of mankind accessible to all people, not only those which have access to the Internet. The DVD also offers further advantages, for example a fast full-text search. "The great demand for the first CD released last fall surprised us a bit," confessed Klempert. Within three months, some 30,000 copies were distributed, in addition to many thousand free downloads of the CD image. The current DVD release is also available for free download.

Links

 * http://de.wikipedia.org/ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 * http://www.wikimedia.de/ - Wikimedia Germany e.V.

Further information
Please see also the press release from Directmedia Publishing. Both reports and an illustration of the DVD can be found at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pressemitteilungen/Wikipedia-DVD.

For general questions about Wikipedia, please see the Foundation press contacts, or those of the German-language Wikipedia.

For questions relating to the DVD release, please contact Directmedia Publishing directly:
 * Gertraud Goetz, Directmedia Publishing GmbH
 * Moeckernstrasse 68, 10965 Berlin
 * Tel. 030/78904653, ggoetz@undefineddirectmedia.de
 * http://www.digitale bibliothek.de