The charitable SOS Children’s Villages have been releasing yearly downloads of a Wikipedia-based DVD full of content from the popular online encyclopaedia and this year is no different. The 08/09 edition sees some 5500 hand-picked educational articles that are aimed at helping developing countries have access to Wikipedia without being connected to the Internet.

The content which is rigorously filtered for suitability and appropriateness has also found their ways into the schools of first-world countries where it is being used for the same purposes. The DVD, which weighs in at 2.9GB is available for download on Bit Torrent. The decision to use P2P technology to distribute the content was purely a logistical one, as it would have crushed servers if the content is offered for direct download.

However, I find it a little surprising that they didn’t fill up the whole DVD with content… as there are still empty room for articles. As it stands though, the content contains some 34,000 images and 20 million words span what would require traditional encyclopedias 21 volumes to contain, and now it fits into the palm of your hand.

The decision to use Bit Torrent was met with some criticisms though, as many users who are not computer savvy enough find it hard to use. However, during test runs with direct download, the server was unable to deliver the sufficient bandwidth anyway. So for those who are interested, the torrent is the only way to get it right now. So head on over to the link and download it to share with your librarian at school.

However altruistic the goal is… I am a little bit skeptical as to the viability of the whole scenario, given how unlikely the school will be to be able to afford computers if they can’t even afford Internet access. I’m sure there are SOME school out there who would benefit from having this sort of content, and the creators have, I am sure, sacrificed a lot of time to compile these.