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Offline Projects/Reports/June 2021

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Objectives of the UserGroup

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There have been many efforts to distribute offline snapshots to places with little connectivity, via schoolservers, wikireaders, and pocket-sized servers that run on batteries. In 2017, a retreat for offline-wiki developers, users, and deployers was organized by Martin Walker at Potsdam University. In addition, Kiwix has organized hackathons for their toolchain and related use cases for many years. This user group is a shared community for people developing any of these offline related initiatives!

This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018 to

+ Consolidate and support offline snapshots of wiki knowledge, and deployments of them in schools, clinics, and rural communities.
+ Update and maintain the offline projects portal on Meta.
+ Advocate for better distribution of and awareness of offline wikis, in all parts of the world where internet access is restricted, expensive, or unavailable: including schools, clinics, prisons, refugee camps, disaster areas.

Activities in 2020-2021

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Note: the best place to follow-up activities and news of the group is the mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l

Kiwix

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ca. 4 million users worldwide (that we are aware of, ie have direct confirmation either from deployment partners or server ping), so that is likely to be a lower bound estimate.

Tech
  • Debian 11 Bullseye was released with a full set of Kiwix software, including the desktop application, a webserver to host ZIM files for others to read and tools for basic ZIM file creation (blog post);
  • Kiwix is now part of the Labdoo base distribution;
  • Implemented Zstd indexing (faster search) and WebP compression (for images) in mediawiki-based zim files: the latter allows zim file size to be reduced by ca. 15%;
  • Kiwix is now also available as a Microsoft Edge extension;
Content
  • Gutenberg, Youtube scrapers updated, and OpenEdx scraper released. We also updated WP1 selection bot, which allows for the construction of zim files based on Wikipedia subsets;
  • Wikipedia in Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, English, Russian, and Turkish now available on the distributed (non-censorable) IPFS service;
  • Zimit, a universal scraper, has been released;
Varia
  • An update to the Cardshop has been released, it is now possible to download a preconfigured Hotpost image with Wikipedia and the Wiktionary on it;
  • Kiwix now has an advisory board with members giving insights from geographies/demographies where they are based and Kiwix is most used (Americas, India, Africa, MidEast, Refugee camps);
  • Prizes / recognition: Falling Walls winner. Kiwix source code integrated to Github Arctic codevault.

WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique/en

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The WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique is a training and writing program designed for schools in French speaking Africa, using WikiFundi software. It is targeted at the education community towards using wikimedia tools to acquire and share knowledge to develop skills of the youth and of their teachers. Most of those schools are offline, having only access to Kiwix content. The articles produced are posted on Vikidia, and the pictures on Wikimedia Commons. The initiative successfully took place in 2020-2021 along similar lines than previous years : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique

  • 9 participating countries (Tunisie, Guinée Conakry, Madagascar, Mali, Cameroun, Sénégal, RDC, Côte d’Ivoire et Burkina Faso)
  • 100 participating schools
  • 138 texts proposed by the students (all texts)
  • 869 photos, drawings and videos produced by the kids (all images)
  • 20 winning schools !

Contest is run by Wiki in Africa, in partnership with several usergroups (Mali, Cameroun, Tunisia, Guinea) and Fondation Orange

WikiFundi

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  • A new version of the software is in the work. The goal is to have the plateform working in Spanish. WikiFundi/2021

Offline resources

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  • The WikiAfrica Offline Resources toolbox has been completely rehauled. Old and outdated resources have been removed. Many resources have been added in French and English and a brand new collection created in Spanish, to feed the future version of WikiFundi in Spanish
  • A set of educational resources have been created in French, to teach young people. The topic is related to Intellectual Property Rights and Creative Commons Licenses. The set is being hosted on the French Wikibook : https://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ressources_pédagogiques_relatives_au_droit_d%27auteur. The content of that resource will be added to the Kiwix collections.

Wakoma

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  • In 2020 Wakoma launched the nimble - an open source, portable and offline-first wireless mesh network.
  • In 2021 Wakoma has worked with partners to develop 3 new models of the nimble, as well as Lokal, an open source platform for offline communications and content creation, curation, and consumption.

Internet-in-a-Box

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IIAB continues to ship units at the cost of manufacturing around the world. A total of 16 units were shipped in 2020 with units going to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Australia, France and the USA. Efforts are being supported by Wiki Project Med.

Offline medical ZIMs

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Wiki Project Med has released a 7.1 Gb offline medical ZIM which includes ~50,000 healthcare related articles including video content. Material includes the approximate costs of medications in the developing world, medication doses, and some "how-to" advised regarding procedures.

Anything else ?

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Membership in 2020-2021

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Administrative

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Affiliation

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This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018, by implementers in different countries who found one another and realized that we were not coordinating efforts as well as we might -- and did not know the current status of many important offline projects, as these were not gathered in a single place. The UG was subsequently approved Wikimedians for Offline Wikis

Contacts

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Group contacts as of mid 2021

See also

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