Think of wikipedia content available on CD for offline viewing. You will be able to view wikipedia on the road(laptop). You can gift them to schools which doesn’t have internet connection.Wikipedia certainly can replace Encarta/Britannica for students who can not pay hefty amount.We can distribute the CD version for almost $1 (in India). How we can do this:

1. We can get the latest current dump from wikipedia.com. Either the SQL dump or XML data dump. This gives us the opportunity to present the data the way we want
2. Take only the current version only dump and no images. We can use the current version only to reduce the size. And using images may cause some legal issues
3. Write code to build the index(Lucene). We can build the index on only article headers
4. Put the index and content on CD 5. Write an applet to give a search functionality(again using lucene). And process the data suitable to browser

For the end user:

1. Insert the CD into cdrom
2. Launch index.html on CD using any browser
3. Search and get the results
4. Click on the search results to get the full article

Note: Previously this article was at TechMag, now that page has 303 to here.
Note2: This article was quoted in Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2007/2008 By The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Orbicom