Ok, see my responses bellow. I am interested if there are some users
who actually do use offline wikipedia and how would they like this new
approach.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You don't need a new application for this, you
just need some upgrades to
the ZIM generation pipeline. How about sending patches for
https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwoffliner to generate
category-based ZIM files and the like?
Which is far harder than creating a new application that wouldn't use
this ZIM format. So I don't think so.
Customisation possibilities used to be better here
before
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Offline_content_generator was deployed on
Wikimedia projects, as ZIM files of few hundreds pages were very easy to
make on wiki. Help with the OCG component is also appreciated.
Finally, icnremental ZIM updates are an area of ongoing work. You can
probably help here as well:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T49406#492033
Ok these are all "planned to be implemented" solutions that do not
work now, and maybe will never work. I don't really see any option to
use either of these.
ZIM format is completely incompatible with what I have proposed. It's
one time-baked file that is supposed to be read only, not heavily
modified. SQLite format is far better for this design and already
exist and works.
My goal is to create application that would be naturally extremely
small and super easy to use by users who have no understanding of
computers and who don't want to download 40gb files in any way. Even
if there was a wiki interface that would allow people bake their own
ZIM files, I would find it very complex. If you wanted to add 1 page
to your collection, wiki would have to generate a new file and you
would have to download it again. Using API instead to retrieve data
would be more simple.