[Wikimediaindia-l] Choosing topics for Wikipedia for Schools (Offline Ed) - Indian version : #1 Cities

[Nikhil Sheth]

Hi AshLin,

Great work so far. Hat's off to one who's Wiki-ing the Talk!

I want to share some amazing piece of news.. forgive me if I'm not clear
here... my head is wanting to explode!

1. OpenZIM (.ZIM) is now one of the output formats, available on Wikipedia
Book Creator (the tool that lets us create custom collections of articles
and export them). This feature was rolled out just yesterday or day before
and Tomasz Finc shared the news on offline community list.

2. There are several such books already created and we can browse and engage
in making and customizing them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_books_%28community_books%29

3. One example :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:States_and_territories_of_India . What if
we took this list and merged in more articles on cities and towns and other
content, to create an Indian Geography collection?

4. It is possible to mark parts of pages such that they won't be exported by
the book creator. I don't know the exact templates right now, but this
feature can come in handy in being selective about what parts of a page get
exported.

5. So we can create a list of articles (like you already are), create a
Book, then export it to ZIM format which can then be directly opened in
Kiwix offline reader.

6. Where a lot of customization is necessary, simply another page can be
created in wikipedia under a custom space or a user's space (just like
you've created your list under your namespace)

7. We can even use this to indirectly delete the articles from present
Wikipedia for Schools that we feel is to be excluded. Though of course you
know my stand - I'd rather first add 1000 Indian-oriented articles before
even considering deleting one British one if I wanted to Indianize or
de-Anglicize any collection. Still, it is possible and now easily doable.

Note: By 'we' I am referring to the persons actively and voluntarily taking
part in this project, not the naysayers. As of now only Ashlin seems to have
done any effort at all - hence all the others who have raised some concern
or the other while loosely but visibly alleging that wikipedia contains
pornography and titillating material (and completely ignoring the fact that
our mainstream media is 10 times more objectionable in content than the
unfiltered wikipedia will ever be) and who predict the end of Indian
civilization if underprivileged children (who are blasted with "Sheila ki
Jawani" et al on a daily basis anyways if anybody actually cared to check
ground reality) are allowed to see it while all this time not giving any
real, actionable solutions to the problems they raise - I would rather give
them a complete and total miss until I see the page histories actually
showing up their contributions. But that's just my opinion.

8. There's plenty of room on current Wikipedia for Schools selection for
another 5,000 or more articles (current count is 5500+ wrapped in 2.7GBs and
it's got many large images to boot. Hence my stand on being additive instead
of subtractive). And with the rolling out of free-to-all ZIM creation, we
have unlimited capability to work on it organically and evolve Wikipedia For
Schools Indian Edition as a living project instead of endlessly putting
things off.

9. Some reasons why I, and why I think so many people in the wikimedia
foundation, support ZIM format are :
a. High degree of compression (= many more articles in the same size
package) with real-time operation on the compressed data,
b. natively supported (and v.fast) full text search including non-english
languages,
c. independence from browser vulnerabilities (a typical virus would have a
field day with other versions that use flat HTML files or run on the default
web browser),
d. safety against arbitrary or planned hacking/editing of articles (If I
were a school kid, I'd definitely insert some jokes or smart one-liners into
some articles just for the fun if it and to show off, if it was all just
loose HTML files like it is in so many formats apart from openZIM)
e. portability (ever tried moving 45000+ html files and 1000s of images from
one drive to another?)

ok, enough with the writing. All the best and I'll jump in as soon as I can!


Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India <http://www.teachforindia.org/> Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
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On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Ashwin Baindur
<ashwin.baindur at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello friends,
>
> Article selection for Wikipedia for Schools (Offline Ed) - Indian
> version has begun. I have started selecting articles. I chose
> Geography as a relatively uncontroversial topic to begin with. The
> first items added were the states & union territories -
> uncontroversial, just added them all. The next I have selected are
> Indian cities.
>
> [[User:AshLin/Work_list]]
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Work_list
>
> Any that you feel should be removed/added? Your thoughts on this issue?
>
> Warm regards,
>
>  [[User:AshLin|AshLin]] ([[User talk:AshLin|talk]]) 18:38, 9 March 2011
> (UTC)
>
> _______________________________________________
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