《维基百科全书精选版0.5》(English Wikipedia 0.5)[ISO]

维基百科，英文名为Wikipedia，自由的百科全书。它是一种基于Wiki的百科全书，是一个自由、免费、内容开放的百科全书协作计划，参与者来自世界各地,目前已经成长为全球最大的网络百科全书，百度百科的创作模式的原型也是维基。维基百科全书是一部用不同语言写成的百科全书。该计划自2001年1月15日开始上线，截至2006年1月，英文版维基百科已有1,000,000多个条目，中文维基百科也有超过150,000多个条目。而所有212种语言的版本共有大约250万个条目。大部分网页都可以由任何人使用浏览器进行修改。维基百科的普及也促成了其它计划，例如维基新闻、维基教科书等计划的产生，但是也造成对这些所有人都可以编辑的内容的准确性的争议。

这个为官方发布的wikipedia DVD精选版，从维基百科（英文版）中精选1964篇文章，包括地理、艺术、文学、科学、历史、自然科学等多个方面的文章，这次发布的DVD仅仅是个开始，不久的将来会有更多更好的资源提供给大家--------维基基金会
The Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, a compact disc collection of around 2,000 articles from the English Wikipedia. The project paves the way for many such collections, with larger releases planned in a variety of languages.

Articles were chosen based on criteria for quality and importance set by the Wikipedia community. Topics covered include, among others, geography, arts, literature, science, history, and natural sciences. Users can browse articles using a built-in search engine or by surfing navigational pages.

Martin A. Walker, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam, played a central role in the production of Wikipedia Version 0.5, and in setting criteria for article selection.

“Although this is only a test release, we really tried to produce something the Wikipedia community could feel proud of. We wanted to cover the major topics, while also including a selection of articles considered to be the very best of Wikipedia. These ‘featured articles’ aim to be well written and comprehensive, and also free from errors, bias, vandalism and marketing ”, states Walker.

The community members are welcome to take part in this innovating project, either by helping for the selection process, or by helping at the development of the open-source project Kiwix, which is the software part of the CD. “We hope that everyone is able to participate at the future development of the Encyclopedia, and be proud of its reach. ”, Pascal Martin emphasizes.

Wikimedia France was at the forefront of bringing the CD collection to fruition, and securing the deal with Linterweb, a French technology company. In the future, Wikimedia France also aims to produce a French language CD through Linterweb. The French/English collaboration has proved very successful, and the two groups continue to share ideas and resources.

The Wikipedia Version 0.5 CD is compatible with Windows (back to 98), Macintosh (Intel) OS X and Linux x86. It can be purchased at the price of $13.99.

This CD contains a collection of 1964 articles taken from the English version of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), the online encyclopedia. This is a test version, designed to prepare the way for a larger release. Considerable effort has been made to exclude errors, but it is not perfect. Although the collection is not comprehensive, it does include most major topics. Some specialised articles have been included, in order to showcase excellent writing on narrower topics. Articles may be found using the search engine or the alphabetical list.

The collection contains all countries of the world, all global cities and all known chemical elements as of January 1st, 2007. All articles are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.asp). For a complete list of contributors for a given article, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/ and consult the history section of the article. All images are either declared to be public domain, GFDL, or Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/). For information about author and copyright for a specific image, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/ or http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.