On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Kevin Clark <kevin.clark(a)csoft.co.uk> wrote: Kevin, I think you are taking the wrong way. Many of us have been trying to do this for years. My first version of the full French WP was deployed in 2006. This have been thought through by a lot of people and the conclusion is: it's too difficult to maintain it alone, especially if you want good quality. This is why we created the OpenZIM standard which provides a format and tools to create "resources files" aka distribution of Wikipedia (or else). By using this format, we can safely invest time and resources into a factory of ZIM for the needs of all offline users. There are already a lot of full-WP ZIM file, and also subsets in many languages. Using such a file will give you a complete dump of Wikipedia with images and al. everything working (hopefully ahah). A lot of offline users are using Kiwix, a desktop client which reads ZIM file. I understand you don't want this. That's why we also have kiwix-serve, an HTTP server which serves the ZIM content, including search. The appearance is not exactly the same as on the real WP: we only keep content in the ZIM, not the top and left frames. If this is an urging need (I don't see why you would want that though), you could still hack kiwix-serve to use a WP-like template for serving the content. Now, if the content you want to provide isn't available as a ZIM file yet, just request it and we'll do our best to create a polished ZIM file for it. Please, don't waste the time you have to start yet another barely working solution that no one will ever maintain. renaud

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 17:17, Kevin Clark <kevin.clark(a)csoft.co.uk> wrote: what are your needs which cannot be met? rupert.

Hi Kevin, Am 20.07.2011 18:08, schrieb Kevin Clark: sorry, the articles have always been perfect HTML, so including all links... otherwise it wouldn't make sense at all. ZIM files can be read by different applications, such as a TXT file can be edited in many editor. Kiwix is one of them, kiwix-serve in contrast is a server component - you will need to use your favourite webbrowser to access / browse the content of the ZIM file. As said in 1) already, the content of ZIM files is perfect HTML anyway. Kiwix-serve just provides the HTTP interface between the ZIM reader and the browser. True. Kiwix runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X WikiOnBoard runs on Symbian (and Android) vido and qvido run on extremely small embedded Linux devices (less than 16 MB of RAM) zimreader-java runs on anything that supports Java as stated in 1), ZIM is a mere storage format for HTML content. You can put anything in it, even non-MediaWiki stuff. I am pretty sure that there are Wiktionary ZIM files around, and if not, they can be made easily. Did you know that the "print a book" feature (Collections Extension) in Wikipedia creates ZIM files? I have even heard about a project making combined ZIM files holding both Wikipedia and Wiktionary in the same file. The Wikimedia Foundation is working since more than a year now to provide regular ZIM files from all Wikimedia wikis, just in the same way they already do with XML and SQL files. The ZIM support in Collections Extension was one of the steps to reach this goal. /Manuel -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Abbas Mahmood <abbasjnr(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Agree. I have the same problem as many others do. That's why we should invest more efforts on tools to help people create their own ZIM file. Not sure what you point is here. Kiwix runs on everything from DVD to USB Sticks or HDD or servers. Here in West Africa, CD & DVD are single use only at most due to dust and quality of hardware. Yes, this has been a long time request which have been fixed now. We can embed the index along the ZIM file. renaud

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Abbas Mahmood <abbasjnr(a)hotmail.com> wrote: OK. What I meant by single usage what that the medium is so fragile that you can't use it twice. Mainly because of dust but that depends on the environnement. Main advantage I see to DVD is that it's by far the cheapest option if your content fits on it. renaud

Just a note for apache, one can of course use mod_proxy to put kiwix serve behind apache. Am 20.07.2011 18:32 schrieb "Manuel Schneider" < manuel.schneider(a)wikimedia.ch&gt;gt;: then. I recorded its weaknesses for the Wikipedia project we were planning as: part of our infrastructure but our clients might not want to support it Wiktionary - database dumps are readily available Wiktionary but I don't see that same availability for OpenZIM files

Kevin, You're right that our focus has often been on DVD-sized collections, but bigger collections are available! In some ways bigger is easier because you bypass the whole (very complex!) issue of content selection - but also curation becomes a problem as you scale up.. Are you planning on publishing the entire English Wikipedia? I believe there are such ZIM collections available, but some may be a few months old. More important, they have not been checked against vandalism, which means that some articles may be pure obscenities, etc. (I found some disgusting examples when preparing the Version 0.7 collection.) How are you doing your revisionID selection? Are you using the WikiTrust system we use on the 1.0 collections? If you are producing a vandalism-checked version of the entire English Wikipedia, or you have developed your own tools, we would very much like to share these things with others working in the area. With large storage becoming cheaper, it should now be feasible to put the entire English Wikipedia onto a hard drive or similar; our subset collections are designed for cases where distribution will be via DVD or flash drive (as with the Version 0.7 and 0.8 collections). In the case of Wikipedia for Schools, the producers wanted a collection that was hand-checked for vandalism and child-appropriateness, which is why it is only around 6000 articles (but also why it's so popular!). To avoid the template problems, you should definitely consider the ZIM format, which is designed for this purpose (making content readable offline). As I understand it, you don't need to tie that to a particular reader (Kiwix, Okawix, etc), though these systems are storage-efficient and each represents several years of optimisation work. If you're looking for HTML versions, I believe these are available, and I think Emmanuel has produced such things for Wizzy to help him with his work: http://blog.wizzy.com/post/Kiwix-install-at-Kwena-Malapo-school-Johannesberg Let us know specifically the end format you prefer. (BTW, I'm a collections curator, not a tech person, so please forgive me if I've made any technical errors!) Hope this helps. Good luck! Martin (User:Walkerma, English Wikipedia 1.0 team) Martin A. Walker Department of Chemistry SUNY College at Potsdam Potsdam, NY 13676 USA +1 (315) 267-2271 Kevin Clark wrote: