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@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@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@gmail.com
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Jimmy Wales jwales@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.
Hi SJ, (adding Mad, Ben and Wade to CC)
- For all-platform all-purpose wikireaders, let's use
offline-l@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@lists.laptop
I think at the moment we have too little conversation instead of too much -- both lists are very rarely used, and Wade/Mad/Ben aren't even subscribed to wikireader@lists.laptop.org. Perhaps let's all talk on offline-l@ instead, once it's set up?
Thanks,
- Chris.
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Chris Ball cjb@laptop.org wrote:
Hi SJ, (adding Mad, Ben and Wade to CC)
> * For all-platform all-purpose wikireaders, let's use > offline-l@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@lists.laptop
I think at the moment we have too little conversation instead of too much -- both lists are very rarely used, and Wade/Mad/Ben aren't even subscribed to wikireader@lists.laptop.org. Perhaps let's all talk on offline-l@ instead, once it's set up?
I'm happy to join whatever lists are needed to discuss WikiBrowse. Aleksey should also be CCed as he was instrumental in InfoSlicer development.
-Wade
Chris -
I agree, it would be nice to have all general discussion of readers on a single list until there is more traffic. Once offline-l is created, I'll post a short announcement to the list. For others who want to subscribe or read the wikireader archives, they are here: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/wikireader
Wade, thanks for adding Aleksey. InfoSlicer is a useful counterpoint to traditional readers; and the OpenZim community may be particularly interested in it.
Meanwhile, for those who haven't seen the latest blog post about Zim progress: http://www.openzim.org/2009-10-22_Blog_Post_on_Project_Paroli
It might be worth reconsidering what formats WikiBrowse and cdpedia use.
Chris writes:
I do have a strong interest in trying to get a Spanish snapshot out to
schools
(not just schools that have bought OLPC laptops) in Latin America, working
mainly via ministries of education. Would people be interested in working
on
that?
Yes. The USB key model seems more robust than one requiring a working DVD player, but we should try both and see what the responses are in different areas.
Cheers, SJ
I've just created
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
as a new official WMF location for discussions about both offline reader and editor technologies. Please let me know if you'd like to revise the list description or volunteer as a moderator. This deprecates the old wiki-offline-reader-l mailing list which was never actively used, so I haven't bothered to port the archive.
All, please consider whether you should be on this list, and if so, subscribe directly through the URL above. It should help us to standardize file formats and software approaches, and will also help WMF to identify where it can usefully invest resources.
Samuel, can you help get the word out about this new list?
Thanks and all best, Erik
Have we moved this conversation to a central mailing list?
I'm planning a meeting with executives at Educ.ar in Buenos Aires on December 10th. Is there something I can demonstrate to them at that time? How can I help?
--Jimbo
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 15:27, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
Have we moved this conversation to a central mailing list?
I'm planning a meeting with executives at Educ.ar in Buenos Aires on December 10th. Is there something I can demonstrate to them at that time? How can I help?
We've been working on the spanish cdpedia full text searching, and on making it usable for windows users. We are rushing to finish a new iso release the first days of next week.
Perhaps we can meet here in Buenos Aires before your meeting at Educ.ar, and we can show you our progress, give you a few sample cds, and talk about what's still missing.
cheers,
Lovely. I'll contact you offlist to see if we can arrange to meet!
Alejandro J. Cura wrote:
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 15:27, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
Have we moved this conversation to a central mailing list?
I'm planning a meeting with executives at Educ.ar in Buenos Aires on December 10th. Is there something I can demonstrate to them at that time? How can I help?
We've been working on the spanish cdpedia full text searching, and on making it usable for windows users. We are rushing to finish a new iso release the first days of next week.
Perhaps we can meet here in Buenos Aires before your meeting at Educ.ar, and we can show you our progress, give you a few sample cds, and talk about what's still missing.
cheers,
Hi Jimbo,
we decided at Wikimania that general Wikipedia Offline discussion will be moved to offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org. Individual mailinglists for the projects working on that still exist like dev-l@openzim.org for the ZIM file format or wikireader@laptop.org of OLPC.
Concerning project status:
openZIM has defined a stable ZIM format version 4 beginning this year and implemented the most part of it as a sample / reference implementation. This contains a C++ library used in some products such as Kiwix and derivates (such as MoulinWiki).
In Summer 2009 we published a DVD with the whole German Wikipedia (900k articles in 1.3 G) as a demonstration release. http://openzim.org/2009-06-23_Wikipedia_DVD
Just a week ago we had our second developers meeting and defined a (hopefully last) stable version 5 of ZIM. http://openzim.org/2009-11-23_Report_Developers_Meeting_2009-2 (report not yet ready)
A new software branch has been created and we are working now on the implementation. This version will have some additional features that are mostly not crucial, but very helpful for more powerful readers and - in contrary - some improvements for very small devices. But these improvements on memory footprint and cpu power are more based on implementation than on the format itself.
Tomasz Finc participated at the Developers Meeting we just had, he can give you a direct overview and answer your question personally. He will help us to set up the regular ZIM export for download.wikimedia.org.
Some words from me at Wikimania can be seen here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271434-Manuel_Schneider-openZIM...
Greets,
Manuel
Jimmy Wales schrieb:
Have we moved this conversation to a central mailing list?
I'm planning a meeting with executives at Educ.ar in Buenos Aires on December 10th. Is there something I can demonstrate to them at that time? How can I help?
--Jimbo
dev-l mailing list dev-l@openzim.org https://intern.openzim.org/mailman/listinfo/dev-l
wiki-offline-reader-l@lists.wikimedia.org