Thanks for the response. I reply inline below. Let me know if I missed anything.
I assume you've seen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team], which is closely related.
I've looked at it briefly, but I was more interested in something where the content wasn't curated. Since Wikimedia distributes complete data dumps, I wanted something that could render it entirely (and theoretically the entire site).
- It can edit offline articles — to what end? Does it push these articles
when the device goes online? How does it handle edit conflicts?...
Valid points. The edit ability is not meant for live/real-time editing. I wanted to give the user the ability to correct articles that were sitting on their machine -- especially to remove vandalism. This may be a low-frequency usage, but I think it's a good feature to have.
- 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.
How long are these images cached? Adjustable?
Right now there is no adjustable cache. Every downloaded image gets added to XOWA's library. If users are interested in limiting the size of the downloaded images, I can add it in later as an option.
These are just a couple of thoughts that popped into my mind at first. It might be worthwhile talking to the (English) WP 1.0 folks (we can meet on IRC if you want, let me know) about integrating this with that project...
Sure, I would be interested. Let me know if they think the app is at all a fit.
adding a link to a XOWA install with just the pages selected for WP 1.0?
Well, XOWA is meant to show all the pages in a dump, though theoretically I can add a filter that limits it to those pages selected for WP 1.0
I can see the benefit of having a version of WP 1.0 that is cross-platform/doesn't require addition software/self-contained...at least as a first use for your work.
Yup. That's what I was aiming for: something self-contained and portable but also complete and offline.
See also:
It looks good. This looks similar to the kiwix offline English Wikipedia Dec-2010 45.000 version. I assume this is the online version of WP 1.0?
Thanks.