Hi all,

it is time that I post some information about the Wikimania conference 2010 which took place two weeks ago in Gdansk, Poland.

While I happened to become an organizer of Wikimania I didn't had time to attend all the talks I wanted. But I was able to present a workshop which we (other submitters of similar workshops and me) merged into a a bigger, joint workshop about offline content usage in general. The abstract can be found here: http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Creating_offline_version...

Asaf and Emmanuel also attended this workshop.

There no news for you about my part - I basically presented what openZIM is, how it works, which challenges we meet and which solutions we found and answered a lot of questions about it.

Martin talked about the process in general and the selection of the right content for such an offline publication. This is based on special ratings of articles by the users. He also pointed out how this rating improved the overall quality of the wiki projects and how it is being used for other purposes than just offline selection.

Santosh and Shiju were talking about their need to deploy offline content in India as the internet penetration is somewhat lower than in Europe. That's why they developed an offline version of Malayalam Wikipedia and distributed 500 CDs in schools. Additionally there is the problem that Malayalam scripts are not displayed correctly on a standard computer. While they have much less data - they "just" made an HTML dump of Malayalam Wikipedia - they had to modify the CSS and use some CSS tricks with builtin fonts to enable a correct display of the articles. Also the filenames had to be changed to work with an ISO image and thus all the links had to be adopted. At least for the last part openZIM could be suitable for them. Interesting was the fact that even the Malayalam Wikipedia is not displayed correctly if you don't know their tricks.

There have been other workshops on PediaPress and the collection extension which whould've been interesting as we planned to make an openZIM interface to the collections extension. Unfortunately I was not able to attend this session. Maybe Asaf can tell us more.

Asaf also hold an open meeting for people interested in Developing World issues, a discussion which he started at the Chapters Meeting in April in Berlin. I attended the first meeting in Berlin and it was quite interesting and I see some potential for openZIM to become a part of this effort as offline content is indeed one of the things needed.

I hope that Emmanuel and Asaf want to tell us more here about their experience of Wikimania 2010.

Regards,

Manuel