Hello offliners!
The Foundation has been working on building in support for ZIM files to the
Android App for Wikipedia. We're been in touch with Emmanuel quite a bit
about how this might work.
We've taken on some user research in 2 forms to support this work.
1. An online usability study using usertesting.com
2. An on the ground study in Pune, India
You can see the results from both studies here (linked in "Research
findings"):
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_support/V1_User_resea…
The biggest takeaways that I think will be interesting to you folks are
around size and topic of content. Respondents are largely uninterested in
large file sizes (over 100MB) and would prefer that these files be very
topic specific. These are people working from their own Android phones, who
have connectivity at least some of the time.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Anne
--
*Anne Gomez* // Senior Program Manager, New Readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate
<http://donate.wikimedia.org>. *
We have finalized and tested the image for the alpha version of
internet-in-a-box. We have purchased 100 units which should be shipped
in the next couple of days. Final cost comes in at $33CAD / $27USD per
unit. They contain all of WPs healthcare content in English, Arabic,
and Spanish plus the ability to download our offline medical apps to
your phone. Additional content include practical action, medical
videos by healthphone, and openstreetmaps.
Hopefully shipping within two weeks. Pre-orders here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmSX2TOhwAhIRCGfkIv2Don5o58vVcv5q…
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
Hello y'all,
Quick announcement: we're putting a small grant request with the
Wikimedia Foundation [1]: the overall goal is to improve our user
experience, starting with the long overdue desktop UX/UI revamp.
All comments (and endorsements) are welcome; and if you know a great
UX/UI engineer, let us know!
Stephane
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Kiwix/User_Experience
Hello offliners!
In case you didn't know it, we hosted a session at Wikimania to talk about
access as it is impacted by the cost of data. Offline access is one of the
potential solutions to bridge that gap.
Jorge Vargas led the panel, which I was on alongside Stephane
Coillet-Matillon (Kiwix), Adam Holt (Internet in a Box), Florence Devuoard
(Wikifundi + Wiki Loves Women + more), and James Heilman (Wikimedicine
Project + Wikimedia Foundation board).
We had a great discussion and it was, for me, a great kickoff into the
off.network hackathon the following day.
I've published notes from the session here for those of you who are
interested:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/Wikimania_17_session_notes
As always, let me/us know if you have any questions or follow up comments.
I look forward to continued collaboration in the future!
Anne
--
*Anne Gomez* // Senior Program Manager, New Readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate
<http://donate.wikimedia.org>. *
[Cross-post]
A quick note to announce that Kiwix released this morning a new version of the Wikimed App called Wikimed Mini [1]. It basically complements the earlier app in that it is 90% smaller and should therefore make it easier to download and store by users who need it most (50% of installs for the English version happen on the Indian subcontinent; for the French one, 80% are in Africa).
But apart from this PSA I wanted to share the thinking that went behind the design of this particular app, as I’ve been told it could be of interest to this list:
There basically were three reasons for this "mini" version:
1. When connectivity is an issue, size does matter. If you look at the 20+ main offline medical apps out there, you'll see that they all range in the 25-40Mb (the largest being 120Mb). Several of them have 1M+ downloads, and even if I am no physician I'd say their content is rather minimal and that WP content is far better: yet people download the other, smaller apps rather than our gigantic, all-encompassing 1.2 Gb one;
2. You may have heard that thing about 60% of mobile readers not going past the Lead section [2]. We did too, and took the drastic step of removing everything below that - basically keeping only the lead part and infobox. That saved us about 60%;
3. Then we looked at what was left and figured that infobox illustrations weren't that helpful: either because they look good but are not very informative, or because if they are in fact informative offline limitations make it impossible to see more than a thumbnail. Don't get me wrong: the ability to see high-res images comes high on the list of requests, but a choice was to be made and that one was a low-hanging fruit. So we removed the illustations as well, and now we're left with a 90% smaller app.
In spite of its size, the current Wikimed is rated higher (4.7) and kept longer (75% retention at D30) that most apps (4.2/20%, respectively on average): we’ll keep you posted on how the new app fares in comparison to that.
Cheers,
Stephane
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimedm… <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimedm…>
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Which_parts_of_an_article_do_reade… <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Which_parts_of_an_article_do_reade…>
Hi
I want to announce here the publication of new datasets to easy make
selections of Wikipedia articles. This data can be used by any developer
or tech-friendly guy to create subset of Wikipedia. You can find the
data here: http://download.kiwix.org/wp1/ (or via FTP).
This data repository will be kept up-to-date every month thanks to a few
scripts which are published here:
https://github.com/openzim/wp1_selection_tools. Of course, everything is
free software.
For each of the 500.000+ Wikipedias, you can find there TSV tables which
contain usual indicators of importance for each article: like number of
interlanguage links, number of links pointing to an articles, pageviews,
... All gathered in one file. For the Wikipedia in English you will
benefit in addition of the Wikiproject importance/quality evaluations.
If you are really lazy, there is a "score" file which mix all these
indicators to give a unique score number per article. The methodology is
described here https://github.com/openzim/wp1_selection_tools. For
example, if you want tje TOP1000 articles of Wikipedia, just take the
first thousand lines of the "score" file to get your list of articles.
All this work has been done to allow the creation of TOP Wikipedia
articles ZIM files. It has also been done to make possible the creation
of ZIM extension files, a concept we want to develop to improve our
WikiMed Android apps. Both of them will appear before the end of the year.
Stay tuned!
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 rarely write here specifically about mwoffliner, even if this tool is
time to time named by-the-way in threads. But these last months we have
done many interesting improvements to this important tool and I thought
it might be valuable to report quickly about them.
As a reminder, mwoffliner is a script which is thought to build a ZIM
file from any (recent) online Mediawiki. It scraps a snapshot of the
online wiki (HTML/JS/pictures/...) on your local disk.
Here is the list of recent improvements:
* We have introduce Parsoid as a local dependence, which means that even
if a Mediawiki does not have Parsoid/Visual Editor installed, mwoffliner
should have a chance now to build the ZIM file of it by running Parsoid
locally.
* We have introduced the Parsoid mobile layout suppport which allows to
build ZIM file with a similar layout as Wikipedia Mobile version. This
is pretty much in beta and we plan first to use it only for Wikipedia.org.
* We have introduced the support of audio/video which means that now,
like the pictures, they are mirrored too. Our first tests show that for
Wikipedia it tends to multiply the size of the ZIM file by a factor
four. As a consequence we won't use it directly everywhere. That said
the feature is there and we will step-by-step introduce video in the ZIM
files we are generating with mwoffliner.
* We have published mwoffliner (and mwmatrixoffliner) to the npmjs
repository: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mwoffliner. Now everybody can
install it easily (but you still need to take care about the dependences).
* We have made the script a bit more modular: you can call it like any
other program but now you can also use it as a library in your own
Javascript/Node.js scripts.
* We have moved the git repository to the openZIM organization on
Github: https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner. By moving all our scraper
to the openZIM organization we hope to bring a bit of clarity between
Kiwix and openZIM respective duties. Have a look to all other scrapers
we have migrated to openZIM: https://github.com/openzim
mwoffliner is not a tool for everybody but it is really important to
continue to improve it to provide quality ZIM files of Wikipedia,
Wiktionary, ... So if you have Javascript skills please come to help us
to prepare the next big steps forward
https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/issues
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hi
After a year a half of efforts, we are proud to announce that we have
done our first delivering of ZIM files of the Stack Exchange web sites.
All the ZIM files are freely available to download via the Kiwix
software or directly on the Kiwix download server:
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer websites on topics in
varied fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions,
answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. This
include famous web sites like Stackoverflow.com, AskUbuntu.com or
Superuser.com. More information about Stack Exchange and its more than
100 web sites is available here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange.
This ZIM files are done thanks to regularly updated archives provided on
archives.org and an ad-hoc software our team has specially developed for
that purpose. This software is called "Sotoki" and his of course open
source. You can have a look to the source code here
https://github.com/openzim/sotoki or use it directly using Python pip
packager:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sotoki
We plan to release updates of these ZIM files each time new archives
will be published.
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication