German publishing house Directmedia is taking Wikipedia offline. The German version of the online encyclopedia will be available on a DVD and in print, Heise online reports.

The DVD is available as a free 7.5GB ISO image which you can burn on a DVD. A previous version, which was released in the spring, contained only 2.7GB of data. The new DVD has 200,000-300,000 entries, all in German, and contains more than 100,000 images. The publisher only uses articles from writers who are known to be reliable. However, on the previous DVD were at least a hundred copyrighted articles taken from a DDR Lexika. After the slip-up was discovered, Directmedia immediately replaced the DVD image.

The print version of Wikipedia will be sold for a nominal fee - €9.90 - to cover expenses. The publisher can't claim copyright. Wikipedia publishes everything under a GNU Free Documentation Licence, the same licence used by developers of open-source software.

According to Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, content from the web site may also be burned onto CDs and DVDs for computer users in places like Africa, which lack access to the internet. ®

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