Jimbo - thanks for the spur to clean up the existing work.

All - Let's start by cleaning up the mailing lists and setting a few short-term goals :-)  It's a good sign that we have both charity and love converging to make something happen.

* For all-platform all-purpose wikireaders, let's use offline-l@lists.wikimedia, as we discussed a month ago in the aftermath of Wikimania (Erik, were you going to set this up?  I think we agreed to deprecate wiki-offline-reader-l and replace it with offline-l.)

* For wikireaders such as WikiBrowse and Infoslicer on the XO, please continue to use wikireader@lists.laptop


I would like to see WikiBrowse become the 'sugarized' version of a reader that combines the best of that and the openZim work.  A standalone DVD or USB drive that comes with its own search tools would be another version of the same.   As far as merging codebases goes, I don't think the WikiBrowse developers are invested in the name.

I think we have a good first cut at selecting articles, weeding out stubs, and including thumbnail images.  Maybe someone working on openZim can suggest how to merge the search processes, and that file format seems unambiguously better. 

Kul - perhaps part of the work you've been helping along for standalone usb-key snapshots would be useful here.


Please continue to update this page with your thoughts and progress!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_readers

SJ


2009/10/23 Iris Fernández <irisfernandez@gmail.com>
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia-inc.com> wrote:
>
> My dream is quite simple: a DVD that can be shipped to millions of people with an all-free-software solution for reading Wikipedia in Spanish.  It should have a decent search solution, doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be full-text.  It should be reasonably fast, but super-perfect is not a consideration.
>

Hello! I am an educator, not a programmer. I can help selecting
articles or developing categories related to school issues.

Iris - you know the main page of WikiBrowse that you see when the reader first loads?  You could help with a new version of that page.  Madeleine (copied here) worked on the first one, but your thoughts on improving it would be welcome.