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Offline Projects/Reports/June 2023

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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 2022-2023

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WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique

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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 2022-2023 along similar lines than previous years : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique

 
Full jury WikiChallenge report 2022-2023
 
Communication visual
 
Poster summarizing 6 years of the WikiChallenge Ecoles d’Afrique

In 2022-23, the programme is implemented in 10 countries (those of previous years : Tunisia, Mali, Cameroon, Madagascar, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, RdC, Burkina Faso. Plus a new country: Morroco). The 13 winning establishments were announced on June 05, 2023 during a live WikiAfrica Hour dedicated to the competition. See the replay on YouTube. All together, 630 photos et vidéos have been submitted by the children of 190 schools. This year, a lot of work has been done in terms of communication (Facebook page, Live with invited personalities, recording of testimonials, compilation videos, etc.). See for example this video posted on YouTube, which compiles many testimonies in French - subtitled in English.

To read more

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

Offline medical ZIMs

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We continue to develop MDWiki and build an offline ZIM from the site. This ZIM powers the English offline Android app we build in collaboration with Kiwix. It contains nearly three thousand medical articles developed beyond those found on Wikipedia as well as about 40,000 additional articles from Wikipedia.

We have relaunched our healthcare translation task force based on MDWiki, with the resulting translations going to Wikipedia's in various languages. These articles than through the usual processes get incorporated into offline apps and IIABs.

OFWA Kiwix4schools

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Kiwix4schools 2021/2022 Import report

In 2021 Open Foundation West Africa launched the Kiwix4schools program which aims at alleviating the numerous challenges that students face when accessing internet-based curricula and other complementary educational resources that are mostly found online. We believe that making resources free and open is not the end but making sure every child can access these resources without internet barrier is our topmost priority.

 
2021/2022

Since the inception of this program, we have implemented the project in 7 regions in Ghana, and that includes the Volta, Eastern, Ashanti, Northern, Savannah, North East, and Upper West regions. We have trained a total of 777 students across 22 schools, of whom 49.8% were female. Volunteers were able to install Kiwix on 395 devices at the schools they visited. When volunteers asked students about their access to the internet, 75.5 percent of the students reported having ever used the internet before, and 52% also reported having heard of Wikipedia before; however, for Kiwix, barely 2% had ever heard about it. Another interesting finding that emerged from the project was the unmatched student-to-computer ratio. For all the schools visited, the combined student-to-computer ratio stood at 145:105:395, which was alarming.

Read full detailed report here -

In 2023

We scaled up the project beyond Ghana through the Launch of the Kiwix4Schools Africa Program in partnership with Kiwix organization and support from OKI, ISOC, UNESCO Ghana etc. The goal of the mentorship program is to train and mentor volunteers across the Africa continent on how to use the Kiwix software and implement a project out of it in their communities. With the internet penetration in Africa being about 43% we undertsand that we experiencing similar challenges interms of connectivity on the continent. Kiwix presents itself as a light on the tunnel. This year we certified 65 successful mentors out of 100 enrolled as our Kiwix ambassador from 20 countries. There is currently an ongoing pilot in 5 countries thus Nigeria, Tanzania, Burundi, South Sudan and Congo. We are most grateful to Kiwix and Stephane for playing an instrumental role on this mentorship program.

Kiwix

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Kiwix' growth continued at a moderate pace as we seek to expand the range of content that is available offline (beyond Wikimedia projects). ca. 8-10 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. Traffic from Russia abated after the March-April rush but remains higher than before the war.

Tech
  • A new (3.0) version of Kiwix for iOS/macOS is out, as well as Kiwix-JS 2.0, which allows users on old 32-bit machines (e.g. Windows Vista, or even Windows 95, which are still many in circulation in some areas) to browse zim files;
  • Backend improvements and maintenance have continued (libzim, libkiwix, zim-tools);
  • Started major fixes on mediawiki offliner;
Content
  • A new version of Wikipedia for Schools was released in Arabic. 10,000 articles curated by Arizona State University's Solar SPELL program, who mostly work in East Africa and the Pacific;
  • We added a few more languages following their exit from Incubator: from Altay to Seediq, that's a little under 30 new ones;
  • Not Wikimedia-related, but still of interest to many: iFixit, a collection of repair manuals as well as StackOverflow, the largest coding forum (22M pages);
Varia
  • We've hired our first content manager to help manage the backlog and set a clearer content strategy moving forward.
Hackathons
  • Two hackathon in February (Paris) and May (Athens, along with the Wikimedia hackathon) to focus on the hotspot installer and zimit scraper.

WikiFundi, offline editing wiki software

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A new version of the software was published late 2021. It included content updates and general refresh for the English and French version and the development of a Spanish version. See WikiFundi/2021 for more details. This release was supported by Wikimedia CH. The tool may be found on WikiFundi, for direct download or proposed by Kiwix

Internet-in-a-Box

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In 2022 we shipped a total of 58 units, while for 2023 up to July 9 2023 we have shipped another 4. This year we introduced differential pricing, charging 50 USD for shipping to high income countries and 40 USD for low and middle income countries.

In June 2023 an introductory session on IIAB (and other offline libraries like Butter Box) at DWeb Camp, an event co-hosted by the Internet Archive. A few groups working with satellite providers discussed ways to distribute IIAB snapshots as part of existing initiatives.

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Wikimedia Strategy 2023 : we attended a few online sessions related to the Strategy.

Wikimania : several submissions were made. The following submissions were approved and delivered

Wikimedia Summit :

  • 2022 : we were invited to participate to Summit 2022. User:Anthere was the group representant. The UG was also offered two online spots to participate. Members were informed but no one volunteered.
  • 2023 : There will be no summit in 2023
  • 2024 : Sj has asked to represent the group at the 2024 session on site. Anthere has registered to attend the online preparation session in Sept 2023 and plan to attend the summit online in 2024

Communication

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Membership in 2022-2023

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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 2023

See also

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