Hi Emmanuel,
Thanks for your detailed help!
Taking it to the logical next step, I've created a wiki page for this campaign:
http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition
I will do my best to incorporate all your advice there; requesting you to jump in as well!
All are requested to gather here and collaborate! (including mumbai and pune wikipedia lists here as well). Urging the volunteers who obtain the wikipedia for schools dump to enlist themselves here, and we'll be listing the schools that we empower - one by one!
I'm proud to mention that a school I'm volunteering in Pune, where some Teach For India fellows are teaching, is the first "empowered" school, where I've installed Wikipedia for Schools in the computer lab and the office! It's an under-resourced school but now the kids there have access to a wealth of knowledge! And you should see them in action!
Why I created the page in wikia : In Wikipedia, when I went to create a new page, it clearly said the content ought to be encyclopedic in nature - whereas THIS is more of a movement and recruitment page. So to be on the safe side I went to the education wikia where things are a little sparse ;). I've worked with wikia in toastmasters.wikia.com and am comfortable with it. If anyone can establish a good location on wikipedia itself, which doesn't get deleted later, and migrate everything there, it'll be great! There are lots of external links on this so need to be careful.
Further plans (if you guys can help!): 1. A proliferation meetup where a lot of us can get together and copy the dump to our laptop/netbook/USB drive. 1 goes to 20... and we can scale up the project like crazy. 2. To tie up with DVD distributors and bulk-produce, provided the costs are as low as humanly possible. Maybe Wikimedia India could maintain a stock?
(Seemingly Impossible) Requests: 1. Can anybody add a link to versions of Kiwix that work on non-Windows OS's like Linux, Apple, Android? My focus is on Android, for future mobile perspective... 2. Can we get a version of this that doesn't have Image files? Then the size will be much lesser. Of course, that's less attractive, but I'm looking for an opportunity to take this to mobile devices. How can we edit a .ZIM file?
Cheers, Nikhil Sheth +91-966-583-1250 Pune, India www.nikhilsheth.tk Find me on: Twitter http://twitter.com/nikhiljs | Facebookhttp://www.facebook.com/nikjs| LinkedIn http://in.linkedin.com/in/nikhiljs | Google http://www.google.com/profiles/nikhil.js| RangDehttp://www.rangde.org/investor/nikhilsheth Join me on: Pune Documentary Clubhttp://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=138497769525636| Let's Do it Pune http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lets-do-it-Pune/103857326346659 | Toastmasters in Punehttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Toastmasters-in-Pune/148767611833746
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel@engelhart.org
wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Hi.
On 20/01/2011 03:29, Nikhil Sheth wrote:
I'm trying to spread wikipedia for schools offline edition in my city/country. Got some interested people to join in the project at the wikipedia 10th anniversary meetup at Mumbai, India.<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/WikipediaDay2011%3E,
i've included them in cc.
I've set up a mirror website hosting the large file in parts because
several
people had complained they couldn't download the original thing. http://wikipediaforschools.4shared.com
I wasn't aware of your webpage back then so used a .ZIM file that I found
on
http://www.kiwix.org : schools-wikipedia-full-20081023-rc5.zim
I hope I'm not hosting the wrong file??
This is a great initiative.
The Wikipedia for schools team did not prepare any ZIM file, but provides the collection of articles as a static set of HTML pages and media files directly usable by any browser.
Kiwix (so I) prepared a ZIM file containing exactly these collection of HTML and media files to provide following advantages:
- smaller
- simpler to copy
- Compatible with Kiwix and any ZIM compatbile reader and so provide
additional features like the fulltext search engine for example.
- ...
To answer to your question, yes schools-wikipedia-full-20081023-rc5.zim is the last ZIM of the last Wikipedia for schools selection.
Could you please give me this info: In the press releas<
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/archive/2008/10/2008-wik...
e, a .Torrent file is linked :
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/static/schools-wikipedia-full-2008102...
I need to know what are the contents of this .tar.gz file. Is it for windows or for linux? Is it the same .zim file only? Is it
using
kiwix or something else? Is it pre-indexed?
I think I have answered before to these questions.
On a blog post I created for this, someone posted a link to a large .zip saying this is a pre-indexed packaged version: http://download.kiwix.org/portable/wikipedia_en_for_schools.zip
I was.
So is that the one I should be going with? The current one I'm hosting
needs
a small first-run procedure that has to be done on every computer I put
it
in, of opening the .zim file from kiwix and then indexing it. Also, I had problems with some older computers - the indexing never took off and we
are
limited to click-browsing on those computers.
Your procedure is OK, but with the ZIP file I have proposed this is simpler: you just need to unzip and use Kiwix, install it if you want. No indexing process is needed any more, this is already done.
We know, they are some weird behaviours related to some specific Win configurations which cause search engine related components failures. This is under investigation and we hope to be able to fix it before the final Kiwix 0.9 release.
In any case, in the "install" directory of Kiwix, you should find this file: http://download.kiwix.org/dev/vcredist_x86.exe
Please install it and it should fix the last problems.
Moving on from the downloading aspect, I want to set up a wiki page that will track the proliferation of Wikipedia for Schools. But I can't figure out where to create it, what name to give it and other things. So need a little help there. (wikipedians, you can help?)
I have no special idea about that, but a few remarks.
Wikipedia for schools is the project of "SOS children village UK" and I'm sure they will be happy to get feedback directly from you.
Kiwix also. We have already a map with involved people, developers and users. So feel free to add new points on it: http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Map
And finally, could you connect me with more people in India who are associated with this project or may be interested in networking on it? Is there a facebook page on this? Mind if I set one up?
Not a lot of people from India have contact us, but I will send you separately a few email addresses.
I'm personally really interested to any project concerning the spreading of Kiwix and also to any feedback (feature request, bug reports, etc.)
Regards Emmanuel -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
iEYEARECAAYFAk033PcACgkQn3IpJRpNWtMaBgCfTQ1FdsRUuo/h4dLfpbw2Y7iw 584AoLRv7mJ57fDX/GI3ZxSMUVIvYz0v =yIa9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----