On 7/232/06, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote: Hi! I don't have technical skills (even-english-writing-skills), but want to share my adventures :-) Last November i was invited by Gleducar and the organizers of V Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre, a congress organized by FLOSS community in Rosario, Argentina, to speak about wikimedia projects. Gleducar is an argentine association who promotes the collaborative knowledge construction, using MediaWiki to create free content for schools [1]. To take advantage of my visit, argentine wikipedians organized a meetup [2] [3]. We discussed about the project and searched help from Gleducar and FLOSS community to create a Wikipedia CD version in spanish. Last year, Chilean and Argentine governments started a new project called "My First PC", a plan aiming to create a cheaper personal computer that low-income people could purchase. An OhMyNews report said [4] : "The plan, in the same vein as those adopted by India and Malaysia, which have reported having success with theirs, was not very welcome in Chile. The reason for the anger is that "My First PC" incorporates Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition, making the license price 20 percent of the total price of the computer. Open-source defenders say that you can get a better operating system for free. "My First PC" also includes the Encarta Encyclopedia, tacking on another 12 percent. Critics say users could save their money if they use, for example, Wikipedia, or search for information on the Internet." As a response to the bloggers and media support, we thought that could be a great idea to search a solution to create the spanish CD version. In the meetup we evaluated the germany version, that I saw at 'mania 05, and we didn't like it. We thought that our solution would not have to be based in a LAMP-like technology, and we preferred a simple HTML static dump. Finally, we found Tim Starling's static dumps [5] [6]. Tim's solution is just what we needed, but it doesn't have a search engine included. That dump can be navigable offline by any web browser. If you do a wget of that site now, and burn a CD with the contents, you have a Wikipedia CD version, including the images from Commons. Tim hasn't made any new dump since November 2005. You can navigate this dump, for example in french, here [7]. Since then, we are searching any solutions [8]. We count with Pilaf, the creator of Live Preview, that Lupin uses in his popups tool, as a technical member. Also Educalibre, a chilean Gleducar-like project, is working with us. Gleducar has made a static dump test and has burn it, with success. But we are stopped by the search engine! We thought in a javascript solution, maybe AJAX. I found an online wikipedia browser called Gollum [9] (GPL, but they don't have a downloadable version) that uses AJAX for autodiscover articles name in the search field. I like Gollum and maybe it will be a great tool for a Wikipedia CD version. Now we have more interest, because argentine FLOSS comunnity is working with a OLPC laptop prototype, and they are developing social and educational projects for its use in those laptops. Maybe an OEPC in spanish could be a great project. We know that we will need the WMF help at certain moment, and we won't publish any solution before discussing it with spanish community, SPC and WMF. Well, we will continue our searching and will helping you as much as possible. Kindly regards [1] http://www.gleducar.org.ar [1] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Encuentros/Encuentro_de_Wikipedistas _en_Rosario_2005 [2] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Zuirdj/Rosario_2005 [3] http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no… 756&rel_no=1&back_url= [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Parsers#A_non-parser_dumper [5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Static_dumps [6] http://static.wikipedia.org/fr/index.html [7] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_en_CD [8] http://gollum.easycp.de/en/0,,00.html