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