If you’re addicted to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia like I am, these following two news items will make you happy. The first is that the second annual Wikimedia Foundation conference is taking place August 4-6 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This year’s event will bring together more than 400 Wikimedia contributors, enthusiasts, and scholars from a wide range of fields. Community members from Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are attending the conference.” The conference will highlight the latest Wikimedia project developments, wiki research, and practices in peer production, as well as the people behind this work.

The other news item relates to the conference and a new offline Wikipedia resource. Webaroo, a provider of offline Web technology, is making available Wikipedia…Unplugged, a downloadable, searchable “Web pack” which contains the entire contents of the online encyclopedia’s more than 1 million articles of collective knowledge. The pack, which is around 6GB in size, can be downloaded to a memory card for carrying on a smart phone, for example. The content automatically updates in the background when one connects a loaded device to the Internet.