![]() ![]() Cheap Android devices might spread more quickly, and we really want to facilitate access to free content everywhere. In places where connectivity is a difficult (at least 30 countries on the sole African continent), the only way to access Wikipedia content is Kiwix Desktop, but it still requires a computer and electricity. It is not limited to mobile phones and tablets, but it also powers TV, appliances, “USB computers” and an increasing range of cheap computers. The market of Android-powered devices is exploding. Kiwix for Android is the latest innovation in this series: This app, available from the Google Play Store or from the Kiwix website, allows users of Android-powered devices to browse offline content from Wikipedia and its sister sites. The Kiwix-plug empowers African students to access full snapshots of Wikipedia and Wikisource right from their campus, on their own laptop or phone.The Wikipedia Zero initiative allows cellphone users in Africa and Asia to access parts of Wikipedia without incurring data charges.The Wikipedia Mobile App allows smartphone users to browse Wikipedia on mobile devices, save articles and much more.Kiwix is a software that allows users to browse full snapshots of Wikipedia (and numerous other resources) from a personal computer that isn’t connected to the internet.This is the reason why, throughout the movement, Wikimedians are working to diversify and facilitate access to Wikipedia and its sister sites: ![]() While their regular desktop, online version is enough for most users, it is inadequate for many others. Providing access to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites to as many people as possible is one of the Wikimedia movement’s core goals. You can also download smaller (and custom) selections of pages, if you’re short on storage space. Once you install it on your Android device, you can actually use it to download the whole website, and access its millions of articles even when you’re offline (or when you don’t want to use your data plan). Kiwix isn’t just Yet Another Wikipedia app. I'd love to be able to get a wikimedia grant to work on this, and take on less contract work, but so far their grant process is pretty hard to follow.The Kiwix app empowers Android users to download and view large sets of Wikipedia content on their devices while offline. One disadvantage is you need to provide separate search indexing, but that's doable. Generally I have not been very impressed with the quality of ZIM file tooling. You can distribute a package of text content and image content as separate files, for example. WARC is also probably a better tool for distributing web-archive type content, like wikipedia dumps. You can also do things like re-compress and minify images, a dump intended for a cellphone probably doesn't need 4k images. There are a lot of advantages to starting from a dump, you can provide much better tools for filtering articles, probably even provide rudimentary document classification. I haven't had time to really track that down, but if anyone want to it's pretty easy to reproduce, just try adding a few million lorum-ipsum articles and look at how far from linear time it's running. Oddly enough where I've run into the biggest issues is in weird slowdowns of the python WARCIO library that making dealing with large archives just about impossible. Rendering wikitext is challenging though, since wikitext can include chunks of other wikitext, and wikitext can use some pretty complicated templating functionality. ![]() I've been trying to put together a system for generating a WARC file by rendering all the wikitext content in a database dump, which is a lot more reasonable of an approach. The whole zim file infrastructure is pretty broken.
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