Wikipedia on Your Hard Drive
I remember hearing a couple of years ago that Wikipedia was available as a downloadable file (!!) and you could put it on your laptop. Got distracted and didn't pursue it, as my three-year-old Thinkpad was getting pretty full and time was (as usual) tight. So this morning I see an article aggregated on Slashdot about how to install Wikipedia locally-and indexing it so you can perform keyword searches.
Whoa. I sat back, and let it sink in.
There are some reasons not to do this-it takes a fair bit of time, some geeky and not-inconsiderable screwing-with-bits, and you lose the up-to-the-minute changes people are constantly making to the database-but when you're done, you can take Wikipedia out into the wilderness while you're researching the feeding habits of the lesser northern verkshquemy, and not have to lug a satellite system on your back.
The astonishing thing to me was the peripheral fact that all of Wikipedia can be crammed into a 3.9 GB download. Good god, I can put that on a thumb drive. (Ok, there's a catch: You don't get all the pictures. I haven't tried this yet; I'm not really sure if you get any.) You could certainly put it into one of the better ebook readers, and before very much longer, onto a smartphone.
I'm pretty much through boggling, but I'm also doubly certain that all this wringing-of-hands over things being "not notable" on Wikipedia is wasted, and mostly bogus. Prior to this morning, I would have guessed that Wikipedia took hundreds of gigabytes or worse. If the whole damned thing can fit on a thumb drive, flame wars about whether accurate material is notable or not notable is ridiculous, another form of fetishism, and probably just a power trip. Basically, throw it all in-let us sort it out.