I just don't think underprivileged people are so desperate for entertainment that they'll browse a 1TB SD card for morsels of wisdom.
Unless you meant you're going to pack it full of movies, music, and games, which actually sounds interesting.
I don't see the parallels.
HN is basically current events social media where people even admit they read the comments instead of TFA. And I think that getting lost on Wikipedia every few weeks is a far cry from browsing old shit on a 1TB SD card for fun in your ramshackle hovel with the family Android tablet.
To me it kinda comes off as the hilarious "wow, those poor people must be so bored watching their paint dry. Maybe I can interest them in something nobody does" wrapped up in some feel good idea about sharing knowledge.
A 1TB dump is not about expecting people to read all of it, it would be about getting a broad enough section of knowledge that the chances of a decent subset of it being of interest to a decent number of people.
And if the purpose is to "spark the next Einstein" as the comment suggested, it doesn't matter if 99% of them ends up being used for games, or sold, or used for all kinds of other things, if a tiny portion triggers an interest in learning and provides a good starting point.
And I call an excessively tangential session a "wikiwalkabout", after the Australian walkabout tradition introduced to Americans by "Crocodile Dundee", or, more recently--the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show have a letdown denoument. But I did like the colossus foot in the later episodes, because it reminded me of "Ozymandias", by P.B. Shelley. And did you know that he wrote that as his shot in a poetry duel with another poet--Horace Smith? (I guess he won, right?) Anyway, they picked that as a topic to honor a new museum exhibit of the Younger Memnon statue of Rameses II. Those British museum-goers were just mad for importing cultural artifacts from distant lands and never sending them back. Like the Elgin Marbles, from Greece. And when I think about Britain and Greece, I can't help thinking about their palace guards--Greece with their poofy-footed Evzones and Britain with their Beefeaters. And one of those Beefeaters is the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London--literally in charge of the welfare of the tower ravens. One of whom is apparently named Merlina, and is allowed additional latitude in how far she may fly, because she always comes back. And speaking of ravens and 19th-century poets, boy was Edgar Allen Poe a gothy li'l guy. He had a lot of inspirational company, though. Including Mary Shelley, wife of the aforementioned P.B., who won a 3-way ghost story duel between herself, her husband, and Lord Byron, who only managed to invent the vampire romance genre. So between the two of them and ol' Rameses II, we're almost all primed to scare the crap out of Laurel and Hardy with Universal Pictures monster movie staples: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. But we still need the Wolfman....
And hopefully you see how it works now. Before wikis existed, there was "Connections", by James Burke.
Yep, that show was a poster-child for the phenomenon called "jumping the shark".
Whenever I see or hear something I don't know about I go look it up on Wikipedia.
Sounding off: I was 12 years old, with a dialup connection and a barely functional windows 98 computer, in a shithole town with no future. I got lost reading into the history of video game consoles, and from there, the history of computing and processors in general. I wouldn't have gotten into computers (and therefore, software development and an actual escape from the shithole town) without my limited access to Wikipedia.
What you're missing is that I wasn't looking for entertainment, I was looking for knowledge. Plenty of people seek it out for it's own merits, and I would love if people in other shitholes were able to be introduced to their hobby or passion.
In fact, before wikipedia, we had an actual, 1970s vintage cheapo encyclopedia set, and I read those multiple times. After that, we had Encarta 2000 on CD-ROM. Thank goodness too, because I probably would have moved on to our dictionary from that point
These are the exact words that I was looking for. Thank you.
As a kid I did this for fun all the time. It was either them or read through the 100s of back issues of Nat Geo that my grand parents had.
Today I easily get lost in wikipedia, and need to make sure I do not waste too much time when I go in looking for a single fact.
I find a lot harder to study on the internet with all its distractions, so I'd guess not much.
Encyclopedias (yes, the dusty paper versions) enabled my development; I would be a completely different person if I didn’t have one when I was a child.
That's not to say that I think giving underprivileged people tablets with Wikipedia is a good idea though.
It didn't work. Probably because gadgets aren't the solution to unequal distribution of privilege.
An alternative data point would be https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata... - the hole in the wall computer that showed giving access to the internet to poor children did have a dramatic effect.
It's not clear that it "didn't work" either. Does that mean no one benefited from it anywhere ever?
An obvious extension would be google-ai-tutor. Inspired by _Diamond Age_.
Software for getting children reading - in their own language first - is a great first step.
See the work being done by the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning
Text compressed well, especially if you have a lot of it and image files usually make up the bulk of any archival effort.