Updates

Check out Mobileread.com's discussion forum. It includes an easy to install package for the Iliad (thank you Adam B), and includes the Midori (Webkit) browser.

Prerequisites

You are going to need a little patience to get this working... I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible, but it's pre-alpha at this stage.

And... I guess you need a Iliad (any version should work). but you need the developer package installed. Check out Adam B's guide.

Don't be scared

These instructions might look scary, but they are simply verbose, and quite easy to follow. Soon you will have Wikipedia on your Iliad!

Installing

Installing the full version of the English Wikipedia (about 3.7GB) is substantially more complicated and will be covered here

We'll go through the process of installing the Simple English version of Wikipedia.

This version will require about 70MB + 22MB (dillo browser) = 92MB free on some USB (stick) or compact flash card. MMC might work too, but is untested and not recommended.

Grab Python 2.5 for the Iliad, and unpack it on the root directory of your flash card. Simplest way is with winrar. This should create a directory called "exe" on your card.

Originally, I had people install the dillo or midori browser to browse the wiki, but Adam B came up with a much easier solution. Just use the internal Iliad browser: which can be started by just browsing a html file, which is now included in the wikiviewer.tar.gz file as "wikipedia.html" in the root directory.

Now that we have python and the browser installed, we need the main program, which can be downloaded here. Unpack it also onto the root of the flash card. It should create 2 directories: "wiki" and "killwiki".

Now get the index file for simplewiki here, and uncompress it to the root of your flash card. It should create a directory called "wikidata"

Now go ahead and get the actual wiki data: simplewiki-20080316-pages-articles.xml.bz2 (22.3 MB) from the simplewiki dump page and copy that one file into the "wikidata" directory on the flash card.

That's it for installing.

Running it

Simply navigate over to the card you installed the stuff on, and select "Wikipedia". It should return pretty quickly. Wait a couple of seconds and then navigate to the "wikipedia.html" file and select it... have fun.