Wikimedia Foundation announced the release of the test version of offline Wikipedia. The project is called Wikipedia On DVD. The CD (yes, actually it's not a DVD - the image has 420MB) includes almost 2000 carefully selected articles including... an article about Ubuntu. That's a major surprise! If you had to pick 2000 most important topics from all areas of knowledge, would you choose a 2.5 years old project? They did and that's a great example of how hugely popular Ubuntu has become lately. Anywhere you go, you read about the brown distro. It's interesting how the focus of articles and comments changes - I remember that around the time I started using it (April 2005, right after Hoary was released), every article started with an obligatory "brown is ugly", "code names are silly" and "Mark's been to space". Now it shifted towards discussions on technical merits and Ubuntu being a really good alternative to Windows. To us it's always been better, but suddenly the outside world really begins to see the bug #1 as solvable.

Personally, I don't really see the reason for the project heading in the "manual selection" direction. Wikipedia's English version alone has over 1.7 million articles and it's pretty clear that some kind of automation is desired. How about letting users rate articles and select the top X based on rating and popularity? I'd rather download full database dumps and install it manually, then bother with installing something that contains only 2000 documents.