Petr, do you think it would be an option to use git version control as a
storage format instead of openzim? Which would facilitate edit and merge
back changes?
Rupert
On Jan 23, 2015 11:59 AM, "Petr Bena" <benapetr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I know most of you hate reinventing a wheel so I first send it here,
before I launch that project :)
Some of you probably know kiwix -
kiwix.org which is offline wikipedia
reader. I think the idea of this reader is cool, most of you probably
sometimes wanted to access wikipedia while being offline somewhere,
but couldn't. Kiwix can help with this, however it has one big problem
and solution for it is so complex that it would basically need a
rewrite of whole thing.
That problem is that you need to download pretty huge file (40+GB) in
order to use it for en wikipedia for example. And if you wanted to
update those few wikipages you are interested in, to a latest
revision, then you again need to download that huge file.
That suck. Especially with GPRS internet and similar connectivity and
it also suck because mobile phones don't even have space for so much
data. My idea is to create app similar to kiwix, that would use SQLite
DB and using wikipedia API it would (slowly, apache friendly) download
contents of any mediawiki installation based on user selection, so
that you could download just a 1 page for offline reading, or 1
category. Or 1000 categories. Or precompiled sets of pages created by
users (books). You could easily update these using API anytime to
latest version. You could get media files for these pages, etc, etc...
(You could probably even edit the pages offline, and then update them
when you are online, but that is just extra feature)
I think this approach would work much better and it's sad kiwix
already doesn't support it. At some point, if it worked I think this
new code could be merged back into kiwix, I am going to use C++ in the
end, which kiwix uses as well.
What do you think about it, is it worth of working on? Is there
actually a community of "offline wikipedia readers" that would
appreciate it?
Thanks
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