Hi Madeleine,
Madeleine Price Ball schrieb:
I was curious if you include images? If not, are you
considering doing
so, and what's stopping you? If so, how do you pick them?
we haven't done this on our "Test DVD" this summer even though this is
easily possible.
Well, easily means: It is easy for the format, but the problem is to
choose the images. Emmanuel Engelhart (Kiwix, he is also part of the
openZIM team) has made some perl scripts for that.
We didn't do it for two reasons:
Lack of time, because even though the tools exist, it's a lot of work.
Searching through the articles, get all the image URLs, get the images,
decide in which size to resize them etc...
And the openZIM project is not a publisher of offline content. We are
developing a stable, efficient format allowing free interchange of
contents between reader applications and devices and providing a GPL'ed
sample implementation of it.
I did the work for picking which articles & images
went into the XO
activity, based on traffic stats. (We only had 100MB, we got 24k
articles in 80MB and spent the other 20MB on highly compressed
images.) OLPC has other more critical things to worry about these
days, but some of the volunteers who worked on that project might be
interested in helping others.
Well, we had a "Offline Meeting" at Wikimania in Buenos Aires this
summer where Samuel Klein was also participating. Our goal is to
contribute the right technology to make all the offline projects able to
collaborate. Currently everyone is reinventing the wheel when it comes
to storage of the content.
We think that the specific knowledge of the publishers should be how to
select the content - which content goes where in which form - and not
technical questions such as compression, storage or retrieving the data
on the user's end.
Wikimedia Foundation is supporting us so far as they share our goal and
work on a regular export of all Wikimedia wikis into ZIM format (like
you already get SQL and XML dumps on
download.wikimedia.org). They also
have a lots of contacts whith publishers and other projects working on
Wikipedia Offline and connect them with us, so we can improve ZIM to fit
for all the Wikipedia Offline projects.
That's why we defined a new format version at the last Developers Meeting.
Greets,
Manuel
--
Regards
Manuel Schneider
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch