I’m all vote for continuing the HTML wiki dumps that were once done, 2007 was the last?  Why are these discontinued? they would be more useful than the so called “XML”.
 
There is no complete solution to processing dumps, the XML is most certainly not XML in its lowest form, and it IS DEFINITELY a moving target!
 
Regards,
 
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2012 8:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Xmldatadumps-l] [Wikitech-l] HTML wikipedia dumps: Could you please provide them, or make public the code for interpreting templates?
 
Allow me to reply to each point:

(By the way, my offline app is called WikiGear Offline:)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikigear-offline/id453614487?mt=8

> Templates are dumped just like all other pages are...

Yes, but that's only a text description of what the template does.
Code must be written to actually process them into HTML.
There are tens of thousands of them, and some can't be even programmed by me (e.g., Wiktionary's conjugation templates)
If they were already pre-processed into HTML inside the articles' contents, that would solve all of my problems.

> what purpose would the dump serve? you dont want to keep the full dump
> on the device.

I made an indexing program that selects only content articles (namespaces included) and compresses it all to a reasonable size (e.g. about 7gb for the English Wikipedia)

> How would this template API function? What does import mean?

By this I mean, a set of functions written in some computer language to which I could send them the template within the wiki markup and receive HTML to display.

Wikipedia does this whenever a page is requested, but I ignore the exact mechanism through which it's performed.
Maybe you just need to make that code publicly available, and I'll try to make it work with my application somehow.


2012/9/9 Jeremy Baron <jeremy@tuxmachine.com>
On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Roberto Flores <f.roberto.isc@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have developed an offline Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc. app for
> the iPhone, which does a somewhat decent job at interpreting the wiki
> markup into HTML.
> However, there are too many templates for me to program (not to mention,
> it's a moving target).
> Without converting these templates, many articles are simply unreadable and
> useless.

Templates are dumped just like all other pages are. Have you found
them in the dumps? which dump are you looking at right now?

> Could you please provide HTML dumps (I mean, with the templates
> pre-processed into HTML, everything else the same as now) every 3 or 4
> months?

3 or 4 month frequency seems unlikely to be useful to many people.
Otherwise no comment.

> Or alternatively, could you make the template API available so I could
> import it in my program?

How would this template API function? What does import mean?

-Jeremy

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