Petr, do you think it would be an option to use git version control as a storage format instead of openzim? Which would facilitate edit and merge back changes?
Rupert On Jan 23, 2015 11:59 AM, "Petr Bena" benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I know most of you hate reinventing a wheel so I first send it here, before I launch that project :)
Some of you probably know kiwix - kiwix.org which is offline wikipedia reader. I think the idea of this reader is cool, most of you probably sometimes wanted to access wikipedia while being offline somewhere, but couldn't. Kiwix can help with this, however it has one big problem and solution for it is so complex that it would basically need a rewrite of whole thing.
That problem is that you need to download pretty huge file (40+GB) in order to use it for en wikipedia for example. And if you wanted to update those few wikipages you are interested in, to a latest revision, then you again need to download that huge file.
That suck. Especially with GPRS internet and similar connectivity and it also suck because mobile phones don't even have space for so much data. My idea is to create app similar to kiwix, that would use SQLite DB and using wikipedia API it would (slowly, apache friendly) download contents of any mediawiki installation based on user selection, so that you could download just a 1 page for offline reading, or 1 category. Or 1000 categories. Or precompiled sets of pages created by users (books). You could easily update these using API anytime to latest version. You could get media files for these pages, etc, etc... (You could probably even edit the pages offline, and then update them when you are online, but that is just extra feature)
I think this approach would work much better and it's sad kiwix already doesn't support it. At some point, if it worked I think this new code could be merged back into kiwix, I am going to use C++ in the end, which kiwix uses as well.
What do you think about it, is it worth of working on? Is there actually a community of "offline wikipedia readers" that would appreciate it?
Thanks
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