Still trying to figure out what GSoC project to work on with the Wikimedia Foundation? Want to work on something that will make a profound impact, reaching people all over the world - both online AND offline?

The Wikimedia offline [0] team is looking for a developer passionate about leveraging Wikipedia and it sister projects for social good. We are looking for someone to port the WP 1.0 Bot [1] to a Mediawiki extension and expand its feature set. The WP 1.0 Bot is a critical tool in the offline content creation tool chain. It simplifies the processes of building collections of articles to be used offline while also facilitating article quality assessment.

It's already being used to create offline versions of Wikipedia, but communities all around the world have been asking for ways to build their own offline collections of articles for use [2] in places where access to to the same breadth and depth of knowledge as Wikipedia is not available. Think: schools that do not or cannot have access to the internet [3]; places where access to the web and certain types of knowledge is restricted; or even just having the freedom to look up Wikipedia articles without needing to be connected to the 'net.

The current tool lives on the Toolserver as a collection of Perl scripts [4]. They require some degree of manual intervention at the code level in order to run, are only primarily useful for en.wikipedia and currently do not provide an easy way to manage article selections. We want to port the tool to a Mediawiki extension and expand its feature set so that it can be used by any of the wiki projects, make the process of building article collections more accessible, be easy to translate (via translatewiki.net) and have greater visibility/maintainability of the code base. This is a crucial part of our overall effort to develop a cohesive, easy to use suite of tools to simplify the offline content creation process - we are exploring the possibilities of integrating this with the Collection extension [5] (for article collection exports in openZim format) as well as Kiwix [6], an application for reading and searching openZim collections offline.

If this sounds like something up your alley, feel free to email me directly or find me on irc.freenode.net (nick: awjr). I look forward to reading your proposals :D

Arthur Richards

[0] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WP_1.0_bot [2] http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Projects:_Wikipedia_for_Schools/Indian_version [3] http://schools-wikipedia.org/ [4] http://svn.toolserver.org/svnroot/p_enwp10/ [5] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection [6] http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page