6 ms·

See also: Kiwix For one thing, it has an Android app, and it's easy to put the whole thing on your external SD card. It also provides an index for full-text se

by sirsar 13y ago

See also: Kiwix For one thing, it has an Android app, and it's easy to put the whole thing on your external SD card. It also provides an index for full-text search. http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page

gnosygnu 13y ago
Kiwix's Android app and the full-text search are both great features. However, I'll point out that Kiwix has not updated English Wikipedia since January 2012. Also, XOWA works directly with the Wikimedia dumps (http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html) so it's (a) always up to date and (b) can work on any wiki (Kiwix needs to release the zim file first) Also, XOWA can run from an external SD card (including FAT32 formatted ones)
- ddeck 13y ago
  Another Android option is Fastwiki [1]. No images, but provides a conversion tool to convert native Wikimedia dumps. Also works with older Android versions. [1] http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html
ddeck 13y ago
The Kiwix Android app is great. Unfortunately (for me), it requires Android 3.0+. I spent some time trying to port it to 2.1 for an old large format device I have, but could only get it working on 2.2.
AjithAntony 13y ago
My use case is exporting a private mediawiki for use at a prison. Kiwix is a lot more polished than this, especially the user experience. This looks interesting becuase reproduces mediawikis very well. The text-only dump imported pretty well once I figured it out. The kiwix ZIM files are a pain to prepare, and use the public facing API that can be pretty unreliable, especially if your mediawiki hosting is of poor quality. It also forces you to hand curate what you export. Using the direct XML dumps prepared server side is much cheaper, but then you lose the curation. The image situation is unclear here. There are some really confusing instructions about it, but I wasn't able to figure it out. I'll keep using and recommending kiwix for now, but this could be promising.
- gnosygnu 13y ago
  Thanks for giving it a try. Kiwix is definitely more polished in UI, especially as it has been around for 5+ years. I'd like to think that though XOWA isn't as friendly UI wise, it offers a lot more power / options. Regarding images. There is some assembly acquired, but I tried to make the instructions as simple as possible. If you look at http://xowa.sourceforge.net/setup_simplewiki.html http://xowa.sourceforge.net/setup_simplewiki.html, then there should be two steps: * Download the .7z file from from archive.org: http://archive.org/details/Xowa_simplewiki_2013-10-30_images_complete http://archive.org/details/Xowa_simplewiki_2013-10-30_images... * Unzip the .7z file to your XOWA directory. If you're on Windows and have C:\xowa as your folder, you should get a file called C:\xowa\file\simple.wikipedia.org\fsdb.main\fsdb.abc.sqlite3 as well as many others enwiki is a little more difficult, but only in that it requires downloading more files. Let me know if you run into other issues. I'm going off to work now, but I'll check again later. EDIT: I forgot to add that if you set up ImageMagick and Inkscape (installation instructions are on XOWA's Main_Page), you can download images dynamically for each article (i.e.: you don't need to download the entire image dump first)
  - AjithAntony 13y ago
    Thanks your your reply. I did see the things you mention regarding images, but the gap is that I'm exporting a private mediawiki, not one of the well known wikis that you have added explicit support for. I tried tar'ing up my images directory from the server, and unpacking them in a few locations on the filesystem that looked like likely places, but that didn't work. The filesystem layout was kinda confusing with the "user" and "wiki" separation. How would one prepare a similar image database for an unsupported wiki? I expect this is a custom thing you prepared as opposed to the xml text dump which is a standard mediawiki dump format. As to the imagemagik part, it doesn't work for an unsupported wiki. Also, it would be impractical for me to manually crawl my whole site triggering downloads of images, and even if I did that, it is unclear how to package and deploy it. The deployment needs to be completely offline becuase there is no Internet at the prison. Overall, setting up one of the well known wikis is probably pretty smooth, but the private wiki requires a lot of technical knowledge about implementation details that make this tool impractical for unskilled users. Right now, kiwix deployment it is close to ideal. I just need to instruct the unskilled user to replace the ZIM file. There is one small deficiency in the kiwix deployment in that the automatic index files are user specific unless prepared in advance and recorded in the libary.xml file, so in practice I had to prepare a script to make sure the index and library were right. The actual deployment is "copy zim files to this dir, then double-click on this script"

by sirsar 13y ago

gnosygnu 13y ago

Kiwix's Android app and the full-text search are both great features. However, I'll point out that Kiwix has not updated English Wikipedia since January 2012. Also, XOWA works directly with the Wikimedia dumps (http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html) so it's (a) always up to date and (b) can work on any wiki (Kiwix needs to release the zim file first) Also, XOWA can run from an external SD card (including FAT32 formatted ones)

ddeck 13y ago
Another Android option is Fastwiki [1]. No images, but provides a conversion tool to convert native Wikimedia dumps. Also works with older Android versions. [1] http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html

ddeck 13y ago

The Kiwix Android app is great. Unfortunately (for me), it requires Android 3.0+. I spent some time trying to port it to 2.1 for an old large format device I have, but could only get it working on 2.2.

AjithAntony 13y ago

My use case is exporting a private mediawiki for use at a prison. Kiwix is a lot more polished than this, especially the user experience. This looks interesting becuase reproduces mediawikis very well. The text-only dump imported pretty well once I figured it out. The kiwix ZIM files are a pain to prepare, and use the public facing API that can be pretty unreliable, especially if your mediawiki hosting is of poor quality. It also forces you to hand curate what you export. Using the direct XML dumps prepared server side is much cheaper, but then you lose the curation. The image situation is unclear here. There are some really confusing instructions about it, but I wasn't able to figure it out. I'll keep using and recommending kiwix for now, but this could be promising.

gnosygnu 13y ago
Thanks for giving it a try. Kiwix is definitely more polished in UI, especially as it has been around for 5+ years. I'd like to think that though XOWA isn't as friendly UI wise, it offers a lot more power / options. Regarding images. There is some assembly acquired, but I tried to make the instructions as simple as possible. If you look at http://xowa.sourceforge.net/setup_simplewiki.html http://xowa.sourceforge.net/setup_simplewiki.html, then there should be two steps: * Download the .7z file from from archive.org: http://archive.org/details/Xowa_simplewiki_2013-10-30_images_complete http://archive.org/details/Xowa_simplewiki_2013-10-30_images... * Unzip the .7z file to your XOWA directory. If you're on Windows and have C:\xowa as your folder, you should get a file called C:\xowa\file\simple.wikipedia.org\fsdb.main\fsdb.abc.sqlite3 as well as many others enwiki is a little more difficult, but only in that it requires downloading more files. Let me know if you run into other issues. I'm going off to work now, but I'll check again later. EDIT: I forgot to add that if you set up ImageMagick and Inkscape (installation instructions are on XOWA's Main_Page), you can download images dynamically for each article (i.e.: you don't need to download the entire image dump first)
- AjithAntony 13y ago
  Thanks your your reply. I did see the things you mention regarding images, but the gap is that I'm exporting a private mediawiki, not one of the well known wikis that you have added explicit support for. I tried tar'ing up my images directory from the server, and unpacking them in a few locations on the filesystem that looked like likely places, but that didn't work. The filesystem layout was kinda confusing with the "user" and "wiki" separation. How would one prepare a similar image database for an unsupported wiki? I expect this is a custom thing you prepared as opposed to the xml text dump which is a standard mediawiki dump format. As to the imagemagik part, it doesn't work for an unsupported wiki. Also, it would be impractical for me to manually crawl my whole site triggering downloads of images, and even if I did that, it is unclear how to package and deploy it. The deployment needs to be completely offline becuase there is no Internet at the prison. Overall, setting up one of the well known wikis is probably pretty smooth, but the private wiki requires a lot of technical knowledge about implementation details that make this tool impractical for unskilled users. Right now, kiwix deployment it is close to ideal. I just need to instruct the unskilled user to replace the ZIM file. There is one small deficiency in the kiwix deployment in that the automatic index files are user specific unless prepared in advance and recorded in the libary.xml file, so in practice I had to prepare a script to make sure the index and library were right. The actual deployment is "copy zim files to this dir, then double-click on this script"