Hi,

speaking from a Kenyan perspective who undertook the Wikipedia for Schools pilot in Kenya: www.wikimedia.or.ke/Wikipedia_for_Schools

One of the major challenges that I faced was that although the Kiwix version was helpful, it could have been better if we had a custom-made version for the Kenyan curriculum, since the one that was available was based on the British curriculum, and therefore there were some topics that Kenyan students needed but weren't there.

Secondly, I find that the use of external hard drives being expensive and unreliable. Expensive, since one HDD costs around ¤50. Unreliable because I distrust students and how sure am I that in a month's time, the students or teachers wouldn't have taken the hard disks and used them for their own personal use? Also it can be easily deleted, unlike when it's on DVD.

Also, some of the computers were so old and had Win XP and somehow, the ZIM files refused to index. I wouldn't be surprised if you get the same problem in Zimbabwe.

Abbas.

> Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:32:42 +0200
> From: manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch
> To: offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Offline-l] Possible template problem
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> Am 20.07.2011 18:08, schrieb Kevin Clark:
> >> what are your needs which cannot be met?
> >
> > We evaluated it a year ago so apologies if things have moved on since then. I recorded its weaknesses for the Wikipedia project we were planning as:
> >
> > 1) No links between articles
>
> sorry, the articles have always been perfect HTML, so including all
> links... otherwise it wouldn't make sense at all.
>
> > 2) Requires it's own browser, not a standard desktop browser
>
> ZIM files can be read by different applications, such as a TXT file can
> be edited in many editor.
>
> Kiwix is one of them, kiwix-serve in contrast is a server component -
> you will need to use your favourite webbrowser to access / browse the
> content of the ZIM file.
> As said in 1) already, the content of ZIM files is perfect HTML anyway.
> Kiwix-serve just provides the HTTP interface between the ZIM reader and
> the browser.
>
> > 3) Doesn't run under Apache
>
> True.
>
> > A) Our solution could run on Linux or Windows - Linux provides a key part of our infrastructure but our clients might not want to support it
>
> Kiwix runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X
>
> WikiOnBoard runs on Symbian (and Android)
>
> vido and qvido run on extremely small embedded Linux devices (less than
> 16 MB of RAM)
>
> zimreader-java runs on anything that supports Java
>
> > B) Our solution could be extended to support other Wikimedia sites, e.g. Wiktionary - database dumps are readily available Wiktionary but I don't see that same availability for OpenZIM files
>
> as stated in 1), ZIM is a mere storage format for HTML content. You can
> put anything in it, even non-MediaWiki stuff.
>
> I am pretty sure that there are Wiktionary ZIM files around, and if not,
> they can be made easily.
>
> Did you know that the "print a book" feature (Collections Extension) in
> Wikipedia creates ZIM files?
>
> I have even heard about a project making combined ZIM files holding both
> Wikipedia and Wiktionary in the same file.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation is working since more than a year now to
> provide regular ZIM files from all Wikimedia wikis, just in the same way
> they already do with XML and SQL files. The ZIM support in Collections
> Extension was one of the steps to reach this goal.
>
>
> /Manuel
> --
> Regards
> Manuel Schneider
>
> Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
> Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
> www.wikimedia.ch
>
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