Hi AshLin,<br><br>Great work so far. Hat's off to one who's Wiki-ing the Talk!<br><br>I want to share some amazing piece of news.. forgive me if I'm not clear here... my head is wanting to explode!<br><br>1. OpenZIM (.ZIM) is now one of the output formats, available on Wikipedia Book Creator (the tool that lets us create custom collections of articles and export them). This feature was rolled out just yesterday or day before and Tomasz Finc shared the news on offline community list.<br>
<br>2. There are several such books already created and we can browse and engage in making and customizing them here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_books_%28community_books%29">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_books_%28community_books%29</a><br>
<br>3. One example : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:States_and_territories_of_India">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:States_and_territories_of_India</a> . What if we took this list and merged in more articles on cities and towns and other content, to create an Indian Geography collection?<br>
<br>4. It is possible to mark parts of pages such that they won't be exported by the book creator. I don't know the exact templates right now, but this feature can come in handy in being selective about what parts of a page get exported.<br>
<br>5. So we can create a list of articles (like you already are), create a Book, then export it to ZIM format which can then be directly opened in Kiwix offline reader.<br><br>6. Where a lot of customization is necessary, simply another page can be created in wikipedia under a custom space or a user's space (just like you've created your list under your namespace)<br>
<br>7. We can even use this to indirectly delete the articles from present Wikipedia for Schools that we feel is to be excluded. Though of course you know my stand - I'd rather first add 1000 Indian-oriented articles before even considering deleting one British one if I wanted to Indianize or de-Anglicize any collection. Still, it is possible and now easily doable.<br>
<br>Note: By 'we' I am referring to the persons actively and voluntarily taking part in this project, not the naysayers. As of now only Ashlin seems to have done any effort at all - hence all the others who have raised some concern or the other while loosely but visibly alleging that wikipedia contains pornography and titillating material (and completely ignoring the fact that our mainstream media is 10 times more objectionable in content than the unfiltered wikipedia will ever be) and who predict the end of Indian civilization if underprivileged children (who are blasted with "Sheila ki Jawani" et al on a daily basis anyways if anybody actually cared to check ground reality) are allowed to see it while all this time not giving any real, actionable solutions to the problems they raise - I would rather give them a complete and total miss until I see the page histories actually showing up their contributions. But that's just my opinion.<br>
<br>8. There's plenty of room on current Wikipedia for Schools selection for another 5,000 or more articles (current count is 5500+ wrapped in 2.7GBs and it's got many large images to boot. Hence my stand on being additive instead of subtractive). And with the rolling out of free-to-all ZIM creation, we have unlimited capability to work on it organically and evolve Wikipedia For Schools Indian Edition as a living project instead of endlessly putting things off.<br>
<br>9. Some reasons why I, and why I think so many people in the wikimedia foundation, support ZIM format are : <br>a. High degree of compression (= many more articles in the same size package) with real-time operation on the compressed data, <br>
b. natively supported (and v.fast) full text search including non-english languages, <br>c. independence from browser vulnerabilities (a typical virus would have a field day with other versions that use flat HTML files or run on the default web browser), <br>
d. safety against arbitrary or planned hacking/editing of articles (If I were a school kid, I'd definitely insert some jokes or smart one-liners into some articles just for the fun if it and to show off, if it was all just loose HTML files like it is in so many formats apart from openZIM)<br>
e. portability (ever tried moving 45000+ html files and 1000s of images from one drive to another?)<br><br>ok, enough with the writing. All the best and I'll jump in as soon as I can!<br><br><br>Cheers,<br><font color="#888888"><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#888888"><font size="4">Nikhil Sheth<br>
</font>+91-966-583-1250<br>
Pune, India<br><a href="http://www.teachforindia.org/" target="_blank">Teach For India</a> Fellow, 2011-13<br><a href="http://www.nikhilsheth.tk/" target="_blank">www.nikhilsheth.tk</a><br>Find me on: <a href="http://twitter.com/nikhiljs" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="http://www.facebook.com/nikjs" target="_blank">Facebook</a> | <a href="http://in.linkedin.com/in/nikhiljs" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a> | <a href="http://www.google.com/profiles/nikhil.js" target="_blank">Google </a>| <a href="http://www.rangde.org/investor/nikhilsheth" target="_blank">RangDe</a>
<br>Join me on: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=138497769525636" target="_blank">Pune Documentary Club</a> | <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lets-do-it-Pune/103857326346659" target="_blank">Let's Do it Pune</a> | <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Toastmasters-in-Pune/148767611833746" target="_blank">Toastmasters in Pune</a></font>
| <a href="http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition" target="_blank">Wikipedia For Schools project</a></font>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Ashwin Baindur <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ashwin.baindur@gmail.com">ashwin.baindur@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Hello friends,<br>
<br>
Article selection for Wikipedia for Schools (Offline Ed) - Indian<br>
version has begun. I have started selecting articles. I chose<br>
Geography as a relatively uncontroversial topic to begin with. The<br>
first items added were the states & union territories -<br>
uncontroversial, just added them all. The next I have selected are<br>
Indian cities.<br>
<br>
[[User:AshLin/Work_list]]<br>
<br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Work_list" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Work_list</a><br>
<br>
Any that you feel should be removed/added? Your thoughts on this issue?<br>
<br>
Warm regards,<br>
<br>
[[User:AshLin|AshLin]] ([[User talk:AshLin|talk]]) 18:38, 9 March 2011 (UTC)<br>
<br>
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