On 26.01.2015 13:09, Petr Bena wrote:
- 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.
We propose a ZIM file for most of the "important" projects. The problem is that we still don't have the resources to generate all of them one time a month. But, this problem is going to be fixed, we are currently building a farm in wmflabs to provide one time a month a fresh ZIM file of all projects.
- There may be some ZIM's but these don't contain pages that user is
interested in.
- 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).
What you describe here is related to the selection tool, not to Kiwix, neither to the storage format. Extension:Collection was able to generate ZIM files before OCG project. Help-us to bring this feature back.
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.
Downloading each page separately using the API will be for sure slower than downloading the corresponding data in ZIM format... probably even if you re-download all articles (so without any incremental update process).
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).
Kiwix has nothing to do with wikitext and never turns it in HTML.
Emmanuel