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