Hello all, this is a short FYI/reminder to let you know that nominations for this year’s Wikimedia Tech Conference are open until Monday June 17th (this coming Monday)
Form: https://forms.gle/CLeGFSMiEasJgEU27 <https://forms.gle/CLeGFSMiEasJgEU27>
FAQ: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2019/FAQ <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2019/FAQ>
I’ve obviously nominated Emmanuel Engelhart (aka Kelson; https://github.com/kelson42 <https://github.com/kelson42>) to be invited because I think it’s important for the offline community to be involved in the Foundation’s engineering thinking - if only we use a shit ton of their stuff, work across another metric ton of platforms and quite often have to coordinate with WMF tech on some issues.
I would of course gently encourage you to nominate him as well - or anyone you think would bring value to the upcoming discussions (nominations are open to all individuals and orgs, and by the look of it you can nominate as many people as you like).
Cheers,
Stephane
Hi
We have published a new version of MWoffliner: the MediaWiki scraper.
Version 1.9.3 is - like always - available here:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/mwoffliner
This new release contains mostly smaller bug fixes.
Here is the detailed changelog:
* FIX: coordinate retrieval continue bug
* FEATURE: add throttled keepalive log (#791)
* FEATURE: add scraper metadata to ZIM file (#787)
* UPDATE: only collect relevant redirects (#790)
* UPDATE: disable quirks mode for article html (#717)
* UPDATE: improve no-image articlelist home page (#759)
* UPDATE: subsections open by default (#786)
We plan to focus on fixing bugs in a few following maintenance releases.
Around ~30 tickets are still open in our milestone:
https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/milestone/11
Like always, PR and bug reports are welcome at:
https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hello,
We’ve published a series of thematic subsets based on Wikipedia. The idea sort of follows what we had been doing for WikiMed[1], e.g. provide a single, topic-specific zim file based off the same Wikipedia articles - so that if you are a physician in an offline setting you needn’t download the full 5,000,000 articles in order to get the 50,000 you were really interested in (and also: 1 Gb download at most vs. 80Gb).
The list is set to expand, but we’re starting with the following:
Football (soccer)
Basketball
Cricket
History
Geography
Maths
Physics
Chemistry
Comics
The initial selections are based off enwp’s wikiprojects. Most of these are/will be available also in the largest languages (EN/ES/PT/AR/FR/DE/ZH/HI/TR/RU), with some variations as we’re not entirely sure there’s much demand (or material) for Russian articles on cricket.
These selections are easier to find from the app’s library, but they can also be downloaded directly from our public repo [2]. Now that MWoffliner and ZIMfarm are up and (mostly) running, expect updates to run automatically every month or so. And for those asking, the MWoffliner 1.9 release you saw earlier should allow us to finally update larger zim files (>500k), or so we hope/pray/want to believe.
The other thing you will notice is that the landing page is not your usual « Welcome to Wikipedia » blurb. In fact, we did away with most of the text so that we wouldn’t have to design landing pages in languages we don’t understand. A Very Elegant solution was found by the Most Excellent Joseph Reeve : present it as tiles, with the images directly taken from the corresponding Wikidata entry (P18). The 100 articles constituting this new landing page are themselves picked based on a scorecard that ranks articles based on traffic, evaluation and God knows what else, so that in the end the end user is likely to be presented with a landing page on subject s/he’s likely to be interested in[3]. This image [4] shows the Arabic chemistry, Hindi cricket and English basketball selections’ respective landing pages.
Needless to say, we’ve kicked any Wikipedia design custom and convention squarely in the teeth, and have no regrets about it (but fear not: articles themselves remain unchanged; we’re revolutionaries but not punks). As indicated above, the central reason for this approach is that through wikidata we get the appropriate spelling/name for the articles, and can therefore present users with not only the proper content, but also quite simply the right alphabet.
Last but not least, the zim files will come in three flavours: Mini (only into and infobox), No pictures, and Maxi (full content, no videos), the idea being that we provide content best suited to users’ needs, bandwidth and storage space.
If you think there are specific topics of interest we should cover -> https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues <https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues>
Best regards,
Stephane
Kiwix
Internet content for people without internet access
www.kiwix.org <http://www.kiwix.org/>
1- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimed <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimed>
2- http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ <http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/>
3- *cough* unless you check the football selection *cough*
4- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiwix_selections.jpg <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiwix_selections.jpg>
Hi
We have published a new version of MWoffliner: the MediaWiki scraper.
Version 1.9 is - like always - available here:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/mwoffliner
This new release contains again big improvements in term of performance.
MWoffliner 1.9 does require a lot less memory than in earlier version
thanks to the release of new libzim 5.0.0 which happens a few days ago.
Beside this a new experimental feature as been introduced: the scraping
of categories.
Here is the detailed changelog:
* NEW: Implement basic category scraping (#15)
* UPDATE: Update node-libzim (and libzim) to improve memory usage (#706)
* UPDATE: Increase default scrape "speed" (#744)
* UPDATE: Report on failed article downloads ()
* UPDATE: Retry all failed media downloads at the end of scrape (#723)
* UPDATE: Re-introduce --useCache option (#700)
* UPDATE: Reduce system dependencies (#681)
* UPDATE: Use native <details> element for collapsible sections in ZIM
files (#677)
* FIX: Update article title logic (#605)
* FIX: Logging format improvements (#662)
* FIX: Redis clearing improved (#732, #731, #448)
* FIX: Text only article list main page background colour fixed (#728)
* FIX: Resource relative url improvement (#726)
This is the fourth milestone of a few we have planned with the support
of the WMF.
Like always, PR and bug reports are welcome at:
https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hi
We have released a few days ago a new Kiwix-Hotspot version called 2.0.4.
Here is the small changelog:
* Speed up improvements for Wikifundi
* Updated kiwix-serve to 0.9.0
* Remove Ideascube (homepage is static generated on installer)
* Image file shrunk after creation
As a reminder, Kiwix Hotspot is probably the easiest solution to
create your offline WiFi library running on Raspberry Pi. Whatever
your operating system (Windows/MacOS/Linux) is, even if you have no
technical skills, you can in a few clicks create a ready-to-use micro SD
card for your Raspberry-Pi.
More details at https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix-hotspot/
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
