Hi folks in the education & offline content communities,

as you probably know, Kiwix is an offline reader application for ZIM files, which are compressed content packages of Wikipedia content for offline use. ZIM content packages include the "Wikipedia for Schools" selection, the "Wikipedia 0.8" edition, as well as any arbitrary collection of Wikipedia articles through the "Create a book" feature on Wikipedia. As such, they have relevance both for use of our content without Internet connectivity, and use within an educational setting where there may be a desire to use specific selections of content.

An important conversation happening on the Kiwix development list (see email form Tomasz below): How should repositories/feeds of content packages be advertised? This connects to larger/deeper questions about the future direction of our offline efforts, possible inclusion of other educational resources beyond Wikimedia content, feedback channels, etc. (I'll share some more detailed thoughts about those issues soon.)

If you have thoughts re: this first spec (e.g. existing metadata standards that would be useful here -- keep in mind this is highly iterative development), feel free to comment here and we'll pass through important conversations, or participate directly on the Kiwix dev list.

All best, Erik

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org Date: Sun, May 15, 2011 at 3:41 PM Subject: Content manager feed format To: kiwix-developer@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org

Greetings All,

Today Emmanuel posted the first version of the content manager feed format at http://kiwix.org/index.php/FeedFormat. This is the first draft of the XML (like) spec for anyone wanting to publish a feed that Kiwix can understand. For those unfamiliar with the project its part of our current efforts to build out a content manager as documented in http://kiwix.org/index.php/WMF_UX_Improvement_Effort

Were looking to write and implement a spec within our current efforts so that we can eventually have numerous content providers publish content available to Kiwix and any OER tools.

Were especially curious to find anyone who's worked with atom and rss feeds since this will share some similar attributes.

Please help us refine it by commenting and helping us get to our first version.

--tomasz