Hello!
I recently made a "book" via the PediaPress Book Creator[1] prior to my
trip to India, and it has been delightful to use and read on the flight and
in my hotel room here. It had been awhile since I tried to make one, and I
wanted to say great work and good job to PediaPress! Also, the integration
with Kiwix was wonderful, and I love that it now shows up so seamlessly in
my "Library" within Kiwix.
I am not sure if you are aware, but in the recent Readership survey of
Wikipedia readers (from Sept 2011, which is only just now being analyzed),
the *number one request by readers was saving of articles for offline use
(as a PDF): *40% of readers said they would be MORE LIKELY to use Wikipedia
if such a service was available (note: this % is even higher in target
areas like India (50%) and Brazil (52%).* *This is fascinating, for it
shows that we (a) have a broader desire for offline content than just those
without Internet access, and (b) indicates there is great opportunity for
marketing the "Book Creator" tool.
*
*
I want to discuss the points needed to get to (b). The Book Creator tool is
great, and I think is the exact right type of tool to meet the needs of our
readers; but there is much room for improvements. Right now, I personally
find the experience getting to and from the Book Creator tool to be not as
straight forward as would be most beneficial. As this service has such a
huge demand, I think there are some opportunities for the refining of the
"book creator" tool and process. I'd love thoughts on the following and
more:
- *Rebranding: *What are our thoughts on the title "Book Creator"? I
wonder if the title itself is a bit confusing, since people are apparently
unaware of the ability to download as PDF at all! Plus, I personally don't
utilize the tools as a means for creating an actual book, though I
recognize this was the initial purpose: I view it as a way to read a couple
specific articles offline. I think using the word "collection," which we do
informally anyway, is likely more appropriate here. Perhaps "Offline
Collection Creator" or "Article Aggregator" (both terrible ideas, I know,
but I'm just throwing things out there:))
- *Website placement: *I think it is obvious the space the Book Creator
takes on the Left Hand tool bar is not enough to draw attention to the
feature. I wonder if we should attempt to have some sort of a "Save for
Offline Use" button on each article, which would then open a new window
into the collection creator screen? This could look similar to the "Share
this" links which exist on most information websites (for Facebook,
Twitter, email, etc.). This could be next to the "Print" button.
- *Marketing: *Once we feel a bit more confident about usability, it
would be great to market the tool. We can do this in three phases:
- Phase 1: emails to different mailing lists announcing the project,
and asking for suggestions and feedback on the tools
- Phase 2: "pilot" testing of the tool, with banner advertising to
logged-in users
- Phase 3: advertise this functionality via a banner at the top of
Wikipedia!
- *Measurement*: clearly, we should have careful tracking of *books
created* and *downloads by file type* by day. @PediaPress: is this
available yet?
I have some other ideas as well, but wanted to throw these out there for
some immediate reactions. What are people's thoughts? Any other ideas?
Anyone good with website design who could help with rearranging of the
"Book Creator"?? :)
Looking forward to the discussion (which should be moved onto a wiki soon) -
Jessie
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=book_creator…
Out of curiosity, what's the status of the WP 0.9 release of the
English Wikipedia?
Thanks,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi
We have released a new beta of the 0.9 branch. This beta fixes mainly many
issues related to Windows, especially with Windows7. Here the complete
CHANGELOG fromhttp://changelog.kiwix.org:
* FIXED: letton language menu item (ID: 3439113)
* FIXED: Duplicates in publisher& language filters in the content
manager (ID: 3439108)
* FIXED: Many localisation files which were broken due to a buggy script
(ID: 3440627)
* FIXED: Wrong behaviour in case of two different portable kiwix
consecutive runs (ID: 3442083)
* FIXED: Different issues relative to ISO language codes (ID: 3439293)
* FIXED: On Windows, Media Defender complain about chp.exe (ID: 3389953)
* FIXED: Rendering issue when displaying two notifications consecutivly:
only the last one was displayed.
* FIXED: Windows default install directory (to match standarts)
* FIXED: Missing Kiwix shortcuts menu entry on Win7 Application menu
(ID: 3456428)
* FIXED: Buggy permission eskalation in Windows 7 installer (ID: 3442074)
* FIXED: Buggy behaviour if you close the last tab (ID: 3459365)
* FIXED: Double-checked menu items in language/skin menus in case of
abandoned restart process
* FIXED: Few UI bugs related to the navigation history management (ID:
3444677)
* FIXED: Regression impacting reading of splitted big (more than 4GB)
ZIM files (ID: 3463001)
* NEW: New supported user interface languages: Czech (cs), Upper Sorbian
(hsb),
Cyrillic Tatar (tt-cyrl), Lower Sorbian (dsb), Hindi (hi), Gujarati
(gu), Tamil (ta),
Georgian (ka), Estonian (et), Bulgarian (bg), Lithuanian (lt), Oriya
(or), Slovak (sk)
* NEW: Switch off automatically library if loading random article
* NEW: In the library, pressing<ENTER> in your local library directly
open the file
* NEW: Greying "Load random article" menu entry if no content is loaded
(ID: 3439112)
* NEW: Add the support of the "publisher" ZIM Metadata
* NEW: Improved library menus rendering (ID: 3439109)
* NEW: Improved code and documentation of kiwix-manage
* NEW: In library, option to keep ZIM file during content deletion (ID:
3442084)
* NEW: "Copy Link Address" in contextual menu for external links (ID:
3444066)
* NEW: Security code to avoid "displaying" main window outside the
screen (ID: 3415334)
* NEW: "First" and "Last" arrows in the search result page (ID: 3442313)
* NEW: Download ZIM files directly from HTTP - without using metalink
(ID: 3450237)
* NEW: Ctrl+ modifier to Home, Back and Forward buttons to branch to new
tabs (ID: 3459481)
* NEW: Windows installer Silent Mode (with command line option /S)
* NEW: Improved Windows User Interface (by tunning the CSS)
* NEW: Port of console tools kiwix-index, kiwix-manage and kiwix-install
for Windows
Please test as much as possible the following points:
* Windows installer with non-admin users permissions
* Kiwix on Windows7 and Vista
* New console tools on Windows
Download:
* Kiwix at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kiwix/files/0.9_beta5/
* Content at http://www.kiwix.org
Report bugs and request features at:
*http://reportabug.kiwix.org
*http://requestafeature.kiwix.org
Stay tune at:
*http://identi.ca/group/kiwix
*http://planet.kiwix.org
*http://blog.kiwix.org
Regards
Emmanuel Engelhart
On 30/11/2011 04:28, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> I'm asking Emmanuel to send an offline-related summary to
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l .
The Hackathon was this time more open than for example in Berlin, so we
had the visit of many people which mostly were at the same time really
interested in technical details but without mostly knowing so much about
the current technological context.
During two days a small team was in a separate room to speak, work and
exchange about offline, in particular Kiwix:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Offline_room_-_Hackathon_Mumbai_201…
Our focus was mainly on two things:
* Having achievements. After introducing Translatewiki and explaining
how it works, each attendee started to translate (or improve the
translation) of Kiwix in his Indian languages and we achieved
consequently to get Kiwix localised in 4 additional Indian languages.
* Trying to get more hackers involved in offline stuff. A big part of
Sunday was used to explain how works Kiwix, what are the technologies
behind and how to setup a compilation environment. This was not so easy
to have a really interactive session as many of the audience did not
have a GNU/Linux (Windows domination), and the bandwidth was to limited
to start downloading ISOs & VMs (and I had not that stuff by me).
Hope to see one or two members of this team joining the Kiwix dev. team
and starting hacking the code in the next weeks. Many of them already
joined the Kiwix dev. Mailing list:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kiwix-developer
Emmanuel
A quick note that, thanks to the sysadmins/listadmins and Gmane admins,
this list has just been added to Gmane and should appear in their
listings when this message is sent, with archives imported (if not, they
will be very soon).
See http://gmane.org/about.php and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview for info on Gmane
and Wikimedia lists, and please add/update yours if missing.
Sorry for crossposting.
Nemo
Hello all you offline aficionados -
Since so many of the images (and media) in the Offline Wikipedia are
dispersed throughout the vast realms of the Wikimedia Commons, I created a
high-level category in which we can collect and track all media relating to
the Offline Wikipedia Projects. This comprehensive, high-level Category for
Wikipedia Offline on Wikimedia Commons:
Category:Wikipedia Offline Projects (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Offline_Projects).
I added some images and did a few searches to pull in some of the relevant
categories which have already been created. If you have unclassified images
or have previously created categories which could be pulled into this,
please be sure to add them!
Thanks so much for your help -
Jessie
--
*Jessie Wild
Global Development, Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
*
