At Wikimania, this week, Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project has chosen to load a snapshot of select Wikipedia articles onto the laptops it is developing.

OLPC is an MIT-based project established to provide all children in the world access to knowledge and the opportunity to explore, experiment and express themselves. Wikipedia is among the first content to be featured in OLPC laptops. One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide all children in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection.

At Wikimania, Webaroo announced that they had added Wikipedia to over two dozen other web content packs. The Webaroo Wikipedia Pack lets users carry the Web-based, free-content encyclopedia on a smart phone with a compact flash card. Webaroo users can now search the information content of more than one million knowledgeable articles anytime they wish.

Web packs are a repository of free searchable Web pages on a specific topic, including things like New York City, Batman, Oprah Winfrey, soccer news or just regular old U.S. news. Webaroo says it "determines the content value based on the diversity, relevancy and quality of the pages so that they deliver terrific results for almost any query related to the topic being looked up."

If you would like to view Webaroo content on a handheld, a Pocket PC 2003 SE or Windows Mobile 5.0 OS is needed, as well as the Webaroo application for the PC and a USB cable with ActiveSync on the computer for connectivity. Finally, a minimum 256MB external storage card (SD, CF or mini-SD) is required. Webaroo is recommending at least 1GB of RAM and 10GB of free space on the system for the Wikipedia Web pack.

More details are available at the webaroo official site.

• Advisory board: The Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help upgrade partnerships, public relations, financing, etc.

• Wikiwyg: Wikiwyg is a joint venture between Socialtext and Wikia to bring WYSIWYG editing to MediaWiki. The release date is unknown, but both Wikia and Socialtext are devoting their full time development resources towards it.

• Image tagging: Wales noted that a lot of progress was made last year on image tagging, with virtually all the images in some problematic categories eliminated. However, Wales said that there is still much work to do in refining and reforming "fair use."