Update on Offline Wikimedia projects

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Greetings,
With the annual fundraiser wrapping up, two sections of Wikimedia engineering are going to start moving more quickly: Mobile and Offline. The offline ecosystem has a lot of moving parts and it’s easy to get lost. The Wikimedia Foundation is currently focusing on three main areas of intervention: selection tools, file formats and offline apps.
Right now, “Offline” refers to supporting read access to Wikimedia content without an internet connection; increasing reach was identified during the Wikimedia strategic planning process as one of the movement priorities, and the first recommendation of the Offline task force was to “Simplify reuse of content from WMF projects”.
The first step in making Wikimedia content available offline is to select it. The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has been steadily releasing new versions of their beta Wikipedia collections, but technical limitations have hampered how quickly those can be finished. We’re going to evaluate the team’s tool set to see how to support them.
For example, we’re looking at extending the Wikipedia Release Version Tools to add features like sub-selection and comments (see an example of how the tool works for the Physics project).
Once the content has been selected, it needs to be packaged into a standard file format. The openZim format is an actively developed format for offline Wikipedia content, and we want to facilitate its integration into our general architecture.
Our first step is going to be the enhancement of the Collections extension to support openZim. This will be done by our partners from PediaPress, who have already started to work on it. They will need help from other community members to help test the new openZim files created by the extension.
After selection and packaging, the last remaining piece is the application that allows readers to access the content. Over the last many years, there have been lots of Wikipedia offline apps: BzReader, MzReader, WikiTaxi, WikiFilter, Kiwix, Okawix, etc. Some have come and gone, while others continue to thrive and are actively releasing new updates.
One thing we’ve learned looking at this ecosystem is that there is a strong need for a featured, easy-to-use and well supported offline app.
During the strategic planning process, one app emerged as a good candidate for the WMF to actively support: Kiwix. Kiwix has been around since 2007 and, through the great work of its lead developer Kelson, has steadily improved its feature set, platform support and overall stability.
In order to support this work and to help make the application even easier to use, we’ll be conducting a usability study on Kiwix, focused on search and browse, during the first quarter of 2011. Later this year, we’ll be focusing on an easier update cycle using openZim as the underlying storage format.
We hope 2011 will be full of exciting news about offline Wikimedia content. If you’d like to get involved, please participate in the strategic product discussion about Offline, or contact me if you’d like to help with development.
Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manager – Offline, Mobile, & Fundraising

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Hoi,
The choice for openZIM is not obvious… I blogged about this. http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/01/openzim-is-not-supported-here.html
Thanks,
GerardM

openZim format hmm. its look like hard a bit.

@GerardM: I responded on your blog but I’ll also respond here for completeness. Looking over your comments it seems like you want to get Kiwix into translatewiki. I think thats a great idea and we should work with the Kiwix dev team to get it in.

yeah right GerardM! choice for openZIM is not obvious…

Wikipedia for Schools Offline Edition is about to take off here in India in a big way! I’ve set up a wiki page for co-ordinating the grassroots movement with an aim to spread it to schools everywhere where there is no internet access.
We have a ready-for-DVD pre-indexed version and I’ve set up a mirror site that hosts the file in parts; techies are invited to take it, improve it and make torrents etc as well.
http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE

I have instaled persian version of ZIM but its Search engine
Dos’nt Work . what is the solution ??
Thanks Very much

@velayati Can you clarify what happens ? What platform are you on? (Windows, Linux, OSX) Does a dialog box show up? Does it not finish?
Having a comprehensive bug report will help us figure out why this is happening. If you could answer those questions and post your response as a bug to http://tinyurl.com/6dzhazz we’ll be able track down the core issue.

I guess you are on Windows. Please try to install these MS DLLs http://download.kiwix.org/dev/vcredist_x86.exe The search engine should work afterwards.

Mr.Kelson Broken links do not work.Please can you spare a new link? Thank you

thanks very good text..