I'm hoping this forum is a proper place for this message. My apologies if it is not. XOWA is a new open-source offline Wikipedia app which I wrote in my spare time over the past 20 months. You can view screenshots here ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa ) or here ( http://imgur.com/a/OydBK/layout/blog ). Its notable features are: * It is a full-fledged offline HTML reader for English Wikipedia (or any other Wikimedia Foundation wiki) * It works directly against the data-dump files (such as those at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html) * It downloads images from Wikimedia on demand (or locally from a Wikimedia image tarball at http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/imagedumps/tarballs/fulls/20130101/ ) * It can edit offline articles (to update content, correct vandalism or just to experiment) * It navigates between offline wikis (Click on "Look up this word in Wiktionary" and it will open your offline version of Wiktionary) I'm posting here because I'm looking for feedback. So far, I have a few good users, and one exceptional user from German Wikipedia (Schnark: who added MathJax and sortable/collapsible tables). I'm currently looking for others who will try offline images, test English Wikipedia, or review wikis in other languages. The most recent version of XOWA is contained in one zip file. It takes one click and about 3 minutes to download Simple Wikipedia for offline use. XOWA also has a page that lists 596 other wikis that can be set up with one click. English Wikipedia is the largest and it will take between 4 and 5 hours, but most of that time is to download and unzip the 9 GB .bz2 file. If you're interested and have some time, please give XOWA a try. I post Windows-specific instructions below. XOWA also works on Linux (and possibly Mac OS X), so if you want to run on that OS, the instructions are similar except you will need to run "java -jar xowa_linux.jar" or "java -d32 -DstartOnFirstThread -jar xowa_macosx.jar" If you have questions or comments or problems, please post and I will reply. Thanks for your attention. ------------ Instructions ------------ Requirements: * 1 GB free space: XOWA (5 MB) + XUL Runner (32 MB) + Simple Wikipedia (500 MB) + ImageMagick/Inkscape (400 MB) * Windows XP or higher * Java 1.6 or Java 1.7. If Java is not installed on your machine, you can get it from http://www.java.com/en/download Steps * Download xowa_app_windows_v0.2.2.0.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa/files/v0.2.2 * Unzip the file to C:\xowa. When you are done, you should have a file called C:\xowa\xowa.exe as well as many other files and directories * Double-click C:\xowa\xowa.exe. The app should launch and the XOWA Main Page should load. * Click the link for "Set up Simple Wikipedia". Wait about 3 minutes for the wiki to download and install. When it is finished, it will open Simple Wikipedia * Browse Simple Wikipedia. When you are done, click on the Main Page link under XOWA in the left hand navigation bar. * Click the link for "Set up images (Windows)". Wait about 3 minutes for the image programs to install. * Click on Page history on the left hand nav * Select Main_Page for simple.wikipedia.org. Images will now download automatically for any page you visit. Here are some example pages to visit (you can copy and paste these into the address bar): "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/World History", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic architecture", "simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn (planet)" * If you want to try other wikis, click on "list of data dumps" on the XOWA Main Page _______________________________________________ Offline-l mailing list Offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l

Requirements: * 1 GB free space: XOWA (5 MB) + XUL Runner (32 MB) + Simple Wikipedia (500 MB) + ImageMagick/Inkscape (400 MB) * Windows XP or higher

Thanks for the note. Yes, it runs on GNU/Linux (and probably Mac OS X). The instructions in my original email were Windows-centric. I'll make the designation clearer if I resend them again. I didn't intend for *the* to be a point of comparison. Wikipedia's current byline is "The free encyclopedia". Since most of XOWA emulates Wikipedia's look, I just paralleled the phrase. That said, I don't want one word to be a point of misunderstanding. I've updated the website to read "A free, open-source Wikipedia app". Thanks. _______________________________________________ Offline-l mailing list Offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l

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: 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