Hello,
We’ve published a series of thematic subsets based on Wikipedia. The idea sort of follows
what we had been doing for WikiMed[1], e.g. provide a single, topic-specific zim file
based off the same Wikipedia articles - so that if you are a physician in an offline
setting you needn’t download the full 5,000,000 articles in order to get the 50,000 you
were really interested in (and also: 1 Gb download at most vs. 80Gb).
The list is set to expand, but we’re starting with the following:
Football (soccer)
Basketball
Cricket
History
Geography
Maths
Physics
Chemistry
Comics
The initial selections are based off enwp’s wikiprojects. Most of these are/will be
available also in the largest languages (EN/ES/PT/AR/FR/DE/ZH/HI/TR/RU), with some
variations as we’re not entirely sure there’s much demand (or material) for Russian
articles on cricket.
These selections are easier to find from the app’s library, but they can also be
downloaded directly from our public repo [2]. Now that MWoffliner and ZIMfarm are up and
(mostly) running, expect updates to run automatically every month or so. And for those
asking, the MWoffliner 1.9 release you saw earlier should allow us to finally update
larger zim files (>500k), or so we hope/pray/want to believe.
The other thing you will notice is that the landing page is not your usual « Welcome to
Wikipedia » blurb. In fact, we did away with most of the text so that we wouldn’t have to
design landing pages in languages we don’t understand. A Very Elegant solution was found
by the Most Excellent Joseph Reeve : present it as tiles, with the images directly taken
from the corresponding Wikidata entry (P18). The 100 articles constituting this new
landing page are themselves picked based on a scorecard that ranks articles based on
traffic, evaluation and God knows what else, so that in the end the end user is likely to
be presented with a landing page on subject s/he’s likely to be interested in[3]. This
image [4] shows the Arabic chemistry, Hindi cricket and English basketball selections’
respective landing pages.
Needless to say, we’ve kicked any Wikipedia design custom and convention squarely in the
teeth, and have no regrets about it (but fear not: articles themselves remain unchanged;
we’re revolutionaries but not punks). As indicated above, the central reason for this
approach is that through wikidata we get the appropriate spelling/name for the articles,
and can therefore present users with not only the proper content, but also quite simply
the right alphabet.
Last but not least, the zim files will come in three flavours: Mini (only into and
infobox), No pictures, and Maxi (full content, no videos), the idea being that we provide
content best suited to users’ needs, bandwidth and storage space.
If you think there are specific topics of interest we should cover ->
https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues
<https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues>
Best regards,
Stephane
Kiwix
Internet content for people without internet access
www.kiwix.org <http://www.kiwix.org/>
1-
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimed
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimed>
2-
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/
<http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/>
3- *cough* unless you check the football selection *cough*
4-
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiwix_selections.jpg
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiwix_selections.jpg>
