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
Offline experts: ;)
Could you help evaluating this enhancement request filed against
MediaWiki code? Please comment in the report itself.
Bug 28706 - Allow post-parsed documents to be available offline and
saved into IndexedDB and made queryable
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28706
Thank you.
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
xowa is a new open-source, offline wiki application. Among other
features, it imports directly from the Wikimedia data dumps.
v0.3.0 is a general rollup release. It is meant to be stable.
These are the changes since the last announcment (v0.2.2):
* A new UI including image buttons/right-click menu
* Better support for Wikisource (lst and pages extension)
* A basic version of Special:Allpages
* Wiki-specific sidebars
* Reference tooltips
* An options page for configuring font-size
* A Mac OS X package
* Several parser fixes
A screenshot of the latest version is here: http://i.imgur.com/WJRUHTu.png
The files are here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa/files/v0.3.0/
As always, any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks.
Hi
Kiwix and the Wikimedia Foundation are engaged in the creation of a
promotional video for Wikipedia offline.
In a first time, we are looking for personal and inspiring stories about
how offline Wikipedia affects people.
You have maybe one anecdotes or story to tell us? This doesn't need to
be long. If you have pictures, this is even better. The stories should
be sent to stories(a)wikimedia.org
I hope you can find a few minutes for helping us to create this video.
Thank you!
Emmanuel
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
