Jimbo - thanks for the spur to clean up the existing work.
All - Let's start by cleaning up the mailing lists and setting a few
short-term goals :-) It's a good sign that we have both charity and love
converging to make something happen.
* For all-platform all-purpose wikireaders, let's use
offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia, as we discussed a month ago in the aftermath of
Wikimania (Erik, were you going to set this up? I think we agreed to
deprecate wiki-offline-reader-l and replace it with offline-l.)
* For wikireaders such as WikiBrowse and Infoslicer on the XO, please
continue to use wikireader(a)lists.laptop
I would like to see WikiBrowse become the 'sugarized' version of a reader
that combines the best of that and the openZim work. A standalone DVD or
USB drive that comes with its own search tools would be another version of
the same. As far as merging codebases goes, I don't think the WikiBrowse
developers are invested in the name.
I think we have a good first cut at selecting articles, weeding out stubs,
and including thumbnail images. Maybe someone working on openZim can
suggest how to merge the search processes, and that file format seems
unambiguously better.
Kul - perhaps part of the work you've been helping along for standalone
usb-key snapshots would be useful here.
Please continue to update this page with your thoughts and progress!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_readers
SJ
2009/10/23 Iris Fernández <irisfernandez(a)gmail.com>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia-inc.com> wrote:
> >
> > My dream is quite simple: a DVD that can be shipped to millions of people
> with an all-free-software solution for reading Wikipedia in Spanish. It
> should have a decent search solution, doesn't have to be perfect, but it
> should be full-text. It should be reasonably fast, but super-perfect is not
> a consideration.
> >
>
> Hello! I am an educator, not a programmer. I can help selecting
> articles or developing categories related to school issues.
>
Iris - you know the main page of WikiBrowse that you see when the reader
first loads? You could help with a new version of that page. Madeleine
(copied here) worked on the first one, but your thoughts on improving it
would be welcome.
After some discussion with WMF staff and people working on wiki
offline tools, we wanted to make sure we have an official
WMF-designated forum to discuss both offline reader and editor
technologies for Wikimedia Foundation projects and other MediaWikis.
We felt the list name "wiki-offline-reader" didn't reflect
appropriately the need for offline editing and sharing tools, and have
therefore created a new list called offline-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
We'll advertise this new list in the next couple of weeks in various
places. If you're interested in offline discussions, I strongly
encourage you to subscribe there.
Because wiki-offline-reader-l hasn't been very active, I haven't moved
the archives over, but this list won't be deleted for now (I added a
deprecation notice to the list info page).
Thanks and all best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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