When Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program ships its low-cost laptops to developing nations, each of the machines will come loaded with a smattering of articles from Wikipedia, project officials announced today.
One Laptop Per Child plans to sell its computers, for about $130 apiece, to Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand within a year. Instead of hard drives, the machines will have flash drives that come with about half a gigabyte of storage space: not enough for an exhaustive compendium of Wikipedia posts, in other words.
But the laptops will be connected to local mesh networks, said Walter Bender, a former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab who is now working with Mr. Negroponte on the laptop project. Those networks should allow project officials to create local "uber-caches" of Wikipedia material, according to Mr. Bender, by putting different Wikipedia articles on individual machines.
Mr. Bender made the announcement today in Cambridge, Mass., at Wikimania 2006, a three-day conference devoted to all things Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said he was "very excited about the possibilities" for Mr. Bender’s project. "Wikipedia and OLPC are culturally in tune with each other," Mr. Wales said. —Brock Read
