Thanks for the substantial contribution. Better tools to share Wikipedia have the potential to help many of the billions of people without reliable access to the Internet have at least this one repository of knowledge at their disposal. Important work this.
On 13-01-28 09:30 PM, gnosygnu wrote:
- It downloads images on demand — so someone needs to browse to a page
before downloading the images for it?
Yes, images are downloaded from within the app. For example, if you open up XOWA and browse to simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess, it will open the offline article and then go online and download all the images for it.
XOWA also has the ability to work with the full tarball dumps (hence, dispensing with an always online connection). The tarball dumps are quite big though (English Wikipedia is 2.2 TB), so I don't know how many people would have the patience to download the entire set.
Basically I wanted an offline reader that would also show images. The on-demand download allows users to download images for articles they are interested in. If they want all the images offline, then they have the option of downloading the tarball dumps. I'm still looking at an intermediate option between the two.
Is there an option to use a path on the filesystem rather than a tarball? This would be a pretty huge feature for two reasons:
* in order to sync only new files from http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/images/wikipedia/ one needs to have the images extracted. Extracting multiple terabytes and recreating a tarball requires a lot of extra time and disk space
* filesystem paths can be symlinked so that we can split this (very large) collection across drives
Best, Jason