SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, has released a complete 2008/9 revision of the Wikipedia Selection for Schools, which is perhaps the most successful "checked content" project derived from the English Wikipedia. Previous revisions have been distributed off-line widely across the globe including by the Shuttleworth Foundation to South Africa Schools, by the Hole in the Wall project to rural Indian children and through SOS offices worldwide. The updated selection has the content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia - with 34,500 pictures, 20 million words and articles on more than 5500 topics. This revision, which can be freely downloaded or collected free from SOS Children is selected and organised around the UK National Curriculum and aimed at 8-17 year olds who broadly follow the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere in the world.

Full Download

The full Wikipedia for Schools selection is available via BitTorrent. To download it:

1. Download and install a BitTorrent client if you don't already have one. If you are on Windows you can download µTorrent from our web site. Alternatively search Google for "BitTorrent client". To download µTorrent right click on the following link and "Save Target as…" or "Save Link as…": Download µTorrent. Save the file in a suitable place (e.g. C:/Program Files ) then run the file, no installation is required.

2. Download the torrent file which tells the BitTorrent client what to do. Right click on the following link and "Save Target as…" or "Save Link as…": Download schools-wikipedia-full-20080229.tar.gz.torrent. Open the torrent file from your web browser download or Windows Explorer whereupon it should open in µTorrent. If not Select "Add Torrent..." from the "File" menu in µTorrent.

3. µTorrent should start downloading it. Once the download is completed, you should have a file which is 3118734058 bytes long (MD5: 1241d898585c68c31f9c4edea6aecfb1). You can then open it with a decompression tool, such as 7-zip.

4. It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished. This is so that you can participate in the peer to peer bittorrent cloud for our schools wikipedia distribution. This keeps our bandwidth costs down. [source]