The $100-or-so laptop: PC or not PC?

The $100-or-so laptop will include Wikipedia. There -- doesn't that feel like a case of whiplash? One of the best and most interesting ideas for reimagining the personal computer is colliding with...well, Wikipedia.

Understand, I like Wikipedia. It reflects everything good and bad about the Web: all that information and misinformation, contributed by whoever's interested. Some of it is right, much of it is mostly right, and nearly all of it represents what at least somebody thinks is right. It may not be a lot more authoritative than the first 100 sites turned up in a Google search, but at least it involves a lot less clicking.

(And in fairness, in the wake of recent hoohahs like this one, the Wikimedia Foundation is now focusing on improving Wikipedia's quality.)

Fortunately, the One Laptop Per Child project says it'll be selective about what parts of Wikipedia it'll be bundling with the machines. What's more interesting is how it will bundle Wikipedia, which is far too big to fit in the machines' 500 MB of storage: The content will be shared across the mesh network. Somehow. No one's clear just yet on exactly how.

The obvious case is when one laptop on the mesh network is connected to the Internet; then the rest will all have access too. But this machine is intended for places where Internet access (and even electric power) is hard to come by. What happens then?

Even though one of these machines can't hold something as big as Wikipedia, the content could be spread across the mesh network, with each laptop holding part of it. But the implications of that feel even more like whiplash. When someone goes off the network, their portion of the content leaves too. What does that do to everyone else?

Or will redundant content be juggled somehow to limit what users lose? If so, how many users will the group be able to lose before the shared content becomes unusable?

And while these $100-or-so machines can still have personal uses, if they depend on other machines being on the mesh, does that mean they're no longer personal computers?