Ciao Frederico, we are happy to hear that Wikimedia Italia plans to join our effort to establish a standard offline format for Wikimedia (and other free) content. The idea of openZIM is * to provide documentation of a standardized, efficient file format (the "ZIM file format") for the offline content including ** article hypertext data ** MIME types such as images ** full text search index) * to provide a free and open source implementation of the ZIM file format, consisting of ** libzim (general functions to read and write ZIM files) ** zimwriter (CLI tool to write the raw content from a database to a ZIM file) ** zimindexer (CLI tool to create a full text index) ** zimreader (small webserver application providing access to the ZIM files' contents fur users / readers) There is also Kiwix, another offline reader (GUI application) for Wikipedia which stores its data in ZIM files and uses libzim. MoulinWiki and Wikiwix are basing on Kiwix. openZIM has a booth at the LinuxTag on June 14th to 17th. We are currently working on a Wikipedia DVD with the german Wikipedia we want to give away for free. It will contain a beta release of zimreader, kiwix and a current Wikipedia dump. After LinuxTag we should focus on bugfixing and try to start working on the porting projects. We have a server sponsored by Wikimedia CH (openzim.org) with a wiki, mailinglist and development environment (shell access, databases, subversion repository, virtual Windows instance, Symbian SDK) running there. I would recommend if you would invite all potential developers you have to join our mailing list on dev-l(a)openzim.org and our IRC channel #openzim on Freenode and check out the code from our SVN and start messing around with it. Questions can always been asked on the ML or IRC. Greets, Manuel Am Dienstag, 19. Mai 2009 schrieb Ilario Valdelli: -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch

Ciao Frederico, Am Donnerstag, 21. Mai 2009 schrieb Federico Leva: to clarify: Our aim is to provide tools to create such DVDs. Our zimreader is only a sample application. libzim can be used by everyone who wants to make his or her own Wikipedia reader and use ZIM as a storage format. This results in all Wikipedia readers and dumps will be compatible, meaning that every user can choose his or her favourite reader application and get new Wikipedia dumps from whomever provides a fresh ZIM file. Emmanuel Engelhart, the developer of Kiwix is also part of the openZIM developer team. For making the italian DVD you have several options: * you hire someone to make ZIM files using zimwriter and a reader application using libzim you ship on your DVD * you take zimwriter to make your ZIM file and ship the zimreader or Kiwix on your DVD * you ask someone of our team - most likely Emmanuel - if he is willing to create a DVD for you, using Kiwix or zimreader openZIM does not make or publish DVDs, except of this sample DVD for LinuxTag which is a demonstration object for us. I didn't really get that part. We provide you with the software - it is up to you which articles you put into a ZIM file. The reader software is also available. As an alternative we provide a simple library for software developers so they can implement ZIM without having to get their hands on it. I would be pretty interested, especially in the source code. So if it is online just sent a link to this mailinglist. Greets, Manuel -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch

Ciao Frederic, Am Freitag, 22. Mai 2009 schrieb Federico Leva: okay, I see. I guess we wait for an answer directly from Emmanuel. I won't be a big help here, I am coordinating this project, but I'm not into the developing process itself. You might want to send it to me by mail, I will send you my postal address by private mail (the ML in CC has public archives). I think I have heard from it, but I will look into it. What is your opinion about it? Why you don't use it? (please don't get me wrong, I am really looking forward to have a free and standardized format to be able to exchange data files and readers freely, so I am happy that you want to go with ZIM). Greets, Manuel -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch