On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Kevin Clark kevin.clark@csoft.co.uk wrote:
What you try to achieve already exists IMO.
I beg to differ. The existing solutions I've seen that provide only a small subset of the data and force the user to use a completely different interface. We want the user experience to be as close to the real thing as possible i.e. all the Wikipedia pages are available and the user can choose which client (browser) they use to access the data.
Kevin, I think you are taking the wrong way.
Many of us have been trying to do this for years. My first version of the full French WP was deployed in 2006. This have been thought through by a lot of people and the conclusion is: it's too difficult to maintain it alone, especially if you want good quality.
This is why we created the OpenZIM standard which provides a format and tools to create "resources files" aka distribution of Wikipedia (or else). By using this format, we can safely invest time and resources into a factory of ZIM for the needs of all offline users.
There are already a lot of full-WP ZIM file, and also subsets in many languages. Using such a file will give you a complete dump of Wikipedia with images and al. everything working (hopefully ahah).
A lot of offline users are using Kiwix, a desktop client which reads ZIM file. I understand you don't want this. That's why we also have kiwix-serve, an HTTP server which serves the ZIM content, including search.
The appearance is not exactly the same as on the real WP: we only keep content in the ZIM, not the top and left frames. If this is an urging need (I don't see why you would want that though), you could still hack kiwix-serve to use a WP-like template for serving the content.
Now, if the content you want to provide isn't available as a ZIM file yet, just request it and we'll do our best to create a polished ZIM file for it.
Please, don't waste the time you have to start yet another barely working solution that no one will ever maintain.
renaud