That is still IMHO highly unusable, let me explain why:
Let's define USER as a computer illiterate that has absolutely no
knowledge of how computers work. They got their PC (or mobile) and
want to run offline reader of either wikipedia or their favorite wiki,
which can be non-wmf thing.
Problems:
1) There may be no ZIM's for the wiki they want to use and they have
no idea how to create one. They won't be able to use kiwix here.
2) There may be some ZIM's but these don't contain pages that user is
interested in.
3) There may be some ZIM's but these contain too many pages that user
doesn't need and thus are too large.
I am trying to tell you that ZIM is a very limited solution, I don't
want to say that kiwix is unusable for everyone, it's a very useful
solution for many use cases (for example some school computers /
libraries with no internet access could have kiwix with full
encyclopedia available to everyone), but for USER's (eg. individuals
with limited internet access or no computing knowledge) is pretty much
unusable. I myself am having troubles getting kiwix even to try it
out. I have SSD on my work PC with less than 2gb of free space and at
home, with large HDD I have so slow internet that I would be
downloading that ZIM file few weeks. And I don't even live in some
underdeveloped country, try to imagine how hard this must be for
people with really slow internet (< 20kbs etc).
IMHO best solution for this use-case would be to maintain local DB
that would contain only data for pages selected by user, which would
be downloaded using mediawiki API's, so that there would be no need
for any ZIM packaging whatsoever. The local DB might take more space
than ZIM, it's possible that compression wouldn't be so effective. But
given that user would only have those pages they are interested in, it
would be likely much smaller than whole collection. They would make
"their own" collection, easily with few clicks. For any wiki. Having
this option in Kiwix would be cool, but I can't see anything else what
could be reused than the reader itself (the part of kiwix that turns
wikitext into html page and display it on screen).
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson(a)kiwix.org> wrote:
Dear Petr
On 23.01.2015 11:59, Petr Bena wrote:
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.
We provide smaller ZIM files providing selection of articles (have a look on
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/). AFAIK, for the same amount of information,
we provide the best compression ratio (and consequently potential update
speed).
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's a true, openZIM was thought, implemented and optimized for read-only.
But the sentence "solution for it is so complex that it would basically need
a rewrite of whole thing" is wrong.
Without repeating what Federico already said (later in this thread but
earlier last week), we have almost a solution (implemented by a GSOC
student) to make incremental upgrades. This solution works well but is a
little bit CPU intensive (due to the need to recompress clusters).
A "lazy" version of the patch functionality could fix that quickly (and for
small amounts of articles this would not make a big difference). An
"intelligent" version of diff/patch might avoid both the cluster
re-compression step and the continuous ZIM file growing might also be
implemented.
All of this might be implement in a few weeks by a skilled C++ developer
without the "rewrite of whole thing", just adding new functionnalities.
I have been working on this kind of stuff since almost ten years and have
seen a lot of different offline softwares proposed and part of them
published. None of the ones which brought a real added value to the end-user
was developed quicker than in a few weeks.
Regards
Emmanuel
--
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