Hi Tommi and the rest of the team,
thanks for committing your changes and of course thank you very much for your
work on the project.
I am currently sitting at the Wikimedia Board Panel at the Wikimedia
Conference (chapters meeting) in Berlin.
Yesterday I had an interestng discussion with Asaf Bartov. He is volunteer at
Wikimedia Israel and as a professional he is developper of transactional
systems für banks.
Wikimedia Israel has plans to get the hebrew Wikipedia onto the OLPC and is
looking for technical solutions. Asaf already worked on Bzreader which is a
Reader of the bzip2ed XML dumps the WMF provides. Bzreader runs on
ReactOS-compatibles and has to parse the MW syntax by itself and has a
built-in browser. Asaf already fixed some bugs, but when he heard me in the
introductionery session mentioning openZIM he started thinking about better
investing his effort into something which already works.
We looked into openZIM yesterday, checked out the stuff from Subversion,
compiled it and played with it. I am pretty sure that Asaf will be quite
happy with the update now and I will try to get him on board of the
development team.
This would then also require more frequently commits, so Asaf is able to work
on current code and submit patches.
He also had Kiwix on his hard drive and we updated from Subversion, so we
realised that also Emmanuel did some work on his code, zim replaced zeno now
etc.
There are two other Wikipedia DVD projects on this conference:
* Wikimedia Polska made a Wikipedia DVD based on the HTML dumps the WMF
provides, supplemented with a search engine written in Java, so it runs as an
applet in the browser on any platform.
There will be no other releases as it didn't sell well in Poland.
* Wikimedia Italia has a DVD which will be released in a newer version this
year, but I haven't been able to find out more about it yet.
The main point I think is to get now the dumps working. Can please someone try
to put together the software needed and commit it to our Subversion?
I had a private discussion with Mike Godwin, the general counselor of the WMF,
about the trademarks etc.
As we publish the DVD with Wikimedia CH and it is a non-commercial project, I
will need the approval from Mike Godwin (every single usage of the Wikipedia
logo need approval now), but he is willing to give it to me.
Greets,
Manuel
--
Regards
Manuel Schneider
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch