On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel@engelhart.org> wrote:

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Hi.

On 20/01/2011 03:29, Nikhil Sheth wrote:
> I'm trying to spread wikipedia for schools offline edition in my
> city/country. Got some interested people to join in the project at the
> wikipedia
> 10th anniversary meetup at Mumbai,

> India.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/WikipediaDay2011>,

> i've included them in cc.
>
> I've set up a mirror website hosting the large file in parts because several
> people had complained they couldn't download the original thing.
> http://wikipediaforschools.4shared.com
>
> I wasn't aware of your webpage back then so used a .ZIM file that I found on
> http://www.kiwix.org : schools-wikipedia-full-20081023-rc5.zim
>
> I hope I'm not hosting the wrong file??

This is a great initiative.

The Wikipedia for schools team did not prepare any ZIM file, but
provides the collection of articles as a static set of HTML pages and
media files directly usable by any browser.

Kiwix (so I) prepared a ZIM file containing exactly these collection of
HTML and media files to provide following advantages:
* smaller
* simpler to copy
* Compatible with Kiwix and any ZIM compatbile reader and so provide
additional features like the fulltext search engine for example.
* ...

To answer to your question, yes schools-wikipedia-full-20081023-rc5.zim
is the last ZIM of the last Wikipedia for schools selection.

> Could you please give me this info:

> In the press releas<http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/archive/2008/10/2008-wikipedia-for-schools>e,

> a .Torrent file is linked :
> http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/static/schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.gz.torrent
> I need to know what are the contents of this .tar.gz file.
> Is it for windows or for linux? Is it the same .zim file only? Is it using
> kiwix or something else? Is it pre-indexed?

I think I have answered before to these questions.

> On a blog post I created for this, someone posted a link to a large .zip
> saying this is a pre-indexed packaged version:
> http://download.kiwix.org/portable/wikipedia_en_for_schools.zip

I was.

> So is that the one I should be going with? The current one I'm hosting needs
> a small first-run procedure that has to be done on every computer I put it
> in, of opening the .zim file from kiwix and then indexing it. Also, I had
> problems with some older computers - the indexing never took off and we are
> limited to click-browsing on those computers.

Your procedure is OK, but with the ZIP file I have proposed this is
simpler: you just need to unzip and use Kiwix, install it if you want.
No indexing process is needed any more, this is already done.

We know, they are some weird behaviours related to some specific Win
configurations which cause search engine related components failures.
This is under investigation and we hope to be able to fix it before the
final Kiwix 0.9 release.

In any case, in the "install" directory of Kiwix, you should find this file:
http://download.kiwix.org/dev/vcredist_x86.exe

Please install it and it should fix the last problems.

> Moving on from the downloading aspect, I want to set up a wiki page that
> will track the proliferation of Wikipedia for Schools. But I can't figure
> out where to create it, what name to give it and other things. So need a
> little help there. (wikipedians, you can help?)

I have no special idea about that, but a few remarks.

Wikipedia for schools is the project of "SOS children village UK" and
I'm sure they will be happy to get feedback directly from you.

Kiwix also. We have already a map with involved people, developers and
users. So feel free to add new points on it:
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Map

> And finally, could you connect me with more people in India who are
> associated with this project or may be interested in networking on it? Is
> there a facebook page on this? Mind if I set one up?

Not a lot of people from India have contact us, but I will send you
separately a few email addresses.

I'm personally really interested to any project concerning the spreading
of Kiwix and also to any feedback (feature request, bug reports, etc.)

Regards
Emmanuel
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