Offline-l January 2013

offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org

11 participants
5 discussions

I am the developer of XOWA: a new open-source app that reads Wikipedia offline. I'm looking for some feedback/help
by gnosygnu 13 Mar '13

13 Mar '13

I'm hoping this forum is a proper place for this message. My apologies if it is not. XOWA is a new open-source offline Wikipedia app which I wrote in my spare time over the past 20 months. You can view screenshots here ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa ) or here ( http://imgur.com/a/OydBK/layout/blog ). Its notable features are: * It is a full-fledged offline HTML reader for English Wikipedia (or any other Wikimedia Foundation wiki) * It works directly against the data-dump files (such as those at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html) * It downloads images from Wikimedia on demand (or locally from a Wikimedia image tarball at http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/imagedumps/tarballs/fulls/20130101/) * It can edit offline articles (to update content, correct vandalism or just to experiment) * It navigates between offline wikis (Click on "Look up this word in Wiktionary" and it will open your offline version of Wiktionary) I'm posting here because I'm looking for feedback. So far, I have a few good users, and one exceptional user from German Wikipedia (Schnark: who added MathJax and sortable/collapsible tables). I'm currently looking for others who will try offline images, test English Wikipedia, or review wikis in other languages. The most recent version of XOWA is contained in one zip file. It takes one click and about 3 minutes to download Simple Wikipedia for offline use. XOWA also has a page that lists 596 other wikis that can be set up with one click. English Wikipedia is the largest and it will take between 4 and 5 hours, but most of that time is to download and unzip the 9 GB .bz2 file. If you're interested and have some time, please give XOWA a try. I post Windows-specific instructions below. XOWA also works on Linux (and possibly Mac OS X), so if you want to run on that OS, the instructions are similar except you will need to run "java -jar xowa_linux.jar" or "java -d32 -DstartOnFirstThread -jar xowa_macosx.jar" If you have questions or comments or problems, please post and I will reply. Thanks for your attention. ------------ Instructions ------------ Requirements: * 1 GB free space: XOWA (5 MB) + XUL Runner (32 MB) + Simple Wikipedia (500 MB) + ImageMagick/Inkscape (400 MB) * Windows XP or higher * Java 1.6 or Java 1.7. If Java is not installed on your machine, you can get it from http://www.java.com/en/download Steps * Download xowa_app_windows_v0.2.2.0.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa/files/v0.2.2 * Unzip the file to C:\xowa. When you are done, you should have a file called C:\xowa\xowa.exe as well as many other files and directories * Double-click C:\xowa\xowa.exe. The app should launch and the XOWA Main Page should load. * Click the link for "Set up Simple Wikipedia". Wait about 3 minutes for the wiki to download and install. When it is finished, it will open Simple Wikipedia * Browse Simple Wikipedia. When you are done, click on the Main Page link under XOWA in the left hand navigation bar. * Click the link for "Set up images (Windows)". Wait about 3 minutes for the image programs to install. * Click on Page history on the left hand nav * Select Main_Page for simple.wikipedia.org. Images will now download automatically for any page you visit. Here are some example pages to visit (you can copy and paste these into the address bar): "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/World History", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic architecture", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn (planet)" * If you want to try other wikis, click on "list of data dumps" on the XOWA Main Page

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[PROPOSAL] Small improvement of the ZIM language metadata
by Emmanuel Engelhart 01 Mar '13

01 Mar '13

Hi, I have published a few weeks ago a first bilingual ZIM file. http://download.kiwix.org/zim/other/mullah_piaz_digest.zim By allowing only one language in its metadata, the ZIM format is not adapted for that. See the definition: http://www.openzim.org/index.php/Metadata I propose to allow to give many languages (separated by a colon) codes in the ZIM "Language" Metadata. For a ZIM file in English and Farsi, this would give us: eng,par Remarks? Question? Regards Emmanuel

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Name collision between openZIM and zim-wiki
by Emmanuel Engelhart 14 Jan '13

14 Jan '13

Hi, We have a name collision between our project openZIM and an other project called Zim-wiki: * Zim-wiki (http://zim-wiki.org/), a local wiki solution * openZIM (http://www.openzim.org), a file format to store offline web content Zim-wiki is a little bit older than openZIM, so it seems to be "our fault". Although this problem is not new, this starts to be a real problem. For example for Debian which currently tries to package our zimlib: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=698111 I would propose the name the package like "libopenzim", but this is more a workaround than a real solution. You have maybe more ideas about how to fix this issue? Kind regards Emmanuel

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Javascript ZIM reader?
by Douglas Crosher 04 Jan '13

04 Jan '13

Hi, Has anyone considered a pure Javascript ZIM file reader and Wikipedia reader? I have made a small start, writing some hack code to open a ZIM file and it gets to the point of needing to uncompress a cluster. A start has been made on the needed XZ decompress code but it's not done yet. If practical then this could provide a portable offline reader that could suit any device with a modern web browser, and provide a reader for Android tablets, and Firefox OS, etc. Perhaps even node.js servers. If someone has already tried this and found the performance to be too poor then please let me know? Btw: has adding thumbnail image support to the ZIM file format been considered? This would be very handy for a ZIM file selector in a tablet or phone UI. Regards Douglas Crosher

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70.000 Kiwix downloads in December 2012!
by Emmanuel Engelhart 04 Jan '13

04 Jan '13

Hi We have reached a new peak in our audience last month! We delivered 70.000 copies of Kiwix from our Website: * 40.000 "nacked" tarballs * 30.000 bundles (with a Wikipedia ZIM file) A few Wikipedia communities put notices and this really helped to advert Wikipedia Offline. We also received thousands of user feedbacks telling us and thanking us for helping them having an encyclopedia although they do not (always) have access to internet. If you have ideas to help us spreading Wikipedia offline, feel free to implement them. Your help is really welcome. Kind regards Emmanuel

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Offline-l January 2013