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: Which is far harder than creating a new application that wouldn't use this ZIM format. So I don't think so. 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.

FWIW I also wrote a web app called "Nell's Wikipedia" which behaves as you propose: https://github.com/cscott/nell-wikipedia If you wanted to hack on it, it could use a bit of love. --scott On Jan 23, 2015 7:55 AM, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Petr Bena <benapetr(a)gmail.com> writes: Maybe they have a small webserver set up in a remote place with only sporadic Internet access? Maybe they're running a Mozilla's Firefox OS on a phone and calling apps for that OS "web apps"? -- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084

Yes, this. There is nothing contradictory with "web app" and "offline". It works fine in chrome and other mobile browsers, although we deployed it with mobile Firefox for Android. --scott On Jan 24, 2015 3:00 PM, "Daniel Friesen" <daniel(a)nadir-seen-fire.com> wrote:

I don't really know, it is technically possible but probably not suitable. I don't want to create offline wiki. Just a reader of a wiki, so no complex versioning is required for that. On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 6:00 PM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Either only wikitext or both, at least until I would get some wikitext to html convertor lib On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 7:41 PM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That is still IMHO highly unusable, let me explain why: Let's define USER as a computer illiterate that has absolutely no knowledge of how computers work. They got their PC (or mobile) and want to run offline reader of either wikipedia or their favorite wiki, which can be non-wmf thing. Problems: 1) There may be no ZIM's for the wiki they want to use and they have no idea how to create one. They won't be able to use kiwix here. 2) There may be some ZIM's but these don't contain pages that user is interested in. 3) There may be some ZIM's but these contain too many pages that user doesn't need and thus are too large. I am trying to tell you that ZIM is a very limited solution, I don't want to say that kiwix is unusable for everyone, it's a very useful solution for many use cases (for example some school computers / libraries with no internet access could have kiwix with full encyclopedia available to everyone), but for USER's (eg. individuals with limited internet access or no computing knowledge) is pretty much unusable. I myself am having troubles getting kiwix even to try it out. I have SSD on my work PC with less than 2gb of free space and at home, with large HDD I have so slow internet that I would be downloading that ZIM file few weeks. And I don't even live in some underdeveloped country, try to imagine how hard this must be for people with really slow internet (< 20kbs etc). IMHO best solution for this use-case would be to maintain local DB that would contain only data for pages selected by user, which would be downloaded using mediawiki API's, so that there would be no need for any ZIM packaging whatsoever. The local DB might take more space than ZIM, it's possible that compression wouldn't be so effective. But given that user would only have those pages they are interested in, it would be likely much smaller than whole collection. They would make "their own" collection, easily with few clicks. For any wiki. Having this option in Kiwix would be cool, but I can't see anything else what could be reused than the reader itself (the part of kiwix that turns wikitext into html page and display it on screen). On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart &lt;kelson(a)kiwix.org&gt; wrote: