Thanks for the reply! I didn't know about offline-l. I will forward my email there.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/30/2012 09:08 PM, gnosygnu wrote:
Hi everyone. I wrote an open-source, offline wiki application and wanted to announce it here. My apologies if this email is off-topic for this mailing list, but I am hoping XOWA will interest some of you.
Thank you for sharing! Your post is on-topic here, but you will get a full target audience at the offline-l mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
Your email made me wonder whether we have somewhere a list of applications using the MediaWiki API.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Apps exists but doesn't even qualify as stub... Maybe someone knows another URL...
XOWA is a standalone application that can read and edit Wikimedia data dumps offline. XOWA stands for "XOWA Offlines Wiki Articles!", but it also goes by the more generic "XOWA Offline Wiki Application."
XOWA has several features:
- Displays all articles from a Wikimedia data dump.
- Works with English Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, as
well as the non-English language counterparts (for example, French Wikipedia).
- Renders articles with full HTML formatting.
- Downloads images and other files on demand.
- Edits articles.
- Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
- Installs to a flash memory card for portability to other machines.
- Is customizable and extendable at many levels: from keyboard
shortcuts to HTML layouts to internal options.
- Is open-source under the AGPLv3 license.
Screenshots of XOWA are available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa. Imgur links are listed below:
- The "Wikipedia" article in English Wikipedia (shows an article):
- The "Solar_System#Visual_Summary" section (shows more images):
- The "Pythagorean_Theorem#Algebraic_proofs" section (shows Math
images from LaTeX): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#2
- The "File:Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, from C2RMF retouched.jpg"
image in Wikimedia Commons (shows Wikimedia Commons): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#3
- The "France" article in French Wikipedia (shows a non-English
language wiki): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#4
- The "Sandbox" page in Edit mode (shows edit mode):
As with anything, there are a few caveats:
- Initial release: XOWA is currently in an alpha stage and there are
many defects and omitted features. I'm hoping that 90% of the articles on English Wikipedia will render without issues, though the percentage will be lower on other wikis.
- Performance: XOWA may perform slowly, depending on the machine's
capabilities. As a rough standard of comparison, most pages load in less than 5 seconds on my primary machine (a Windows XP 3.4 GHz machine with 2 GB RAM and a 2 TB 7200 RPM hard drive). However, on my secondary machine (an Ubuntu Linux 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine with a 32 GB SD card) the threshold is 10 seconds.
- Divergent code base: XOWA is written in Java and its approach is not
a direct reproduction of the MediaWiki parser. As such, certain articles will render differently. In addition, many extensions have not yet been implemented in XOWA.
- Some assembly required: XOWA requires that a user assemble the
installation. This includes downloading and unzipping the MediaWiki data-dump, installing xulRunner/imageMagick/inkscape/MiKTeX, editing the config file, running batch files, etc. Although these should be straightforward one-time steps, it does mean that a user must be willing to do some technical tinkering to get XOWA to run.
These caveats notwithstanding, I'm hoping you are willing to give XOWA a try.
Here are the relevant links:
- Instructions: http://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/wiki/Home/
- Files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa/files/
If anyone has questions, please ask, and I will be happy to follow-up with more details. For reddit users, I am going to post a thread at www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia.
Thanks for your time.
-- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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