Submissions/wiki2cd: A tool for creating offline wiki repository for CD/DVD

From Wikimania 2010 • Gdańsk, Poland • July 9-11, 2010


This submission is merged with two other related submissions. Please see - Submissions/Creating offline version of Wiki content - Solutions and Challenges


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Title of the submission

Wiki2cd: A tool for creating offline wiki repository for CD/DVD

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Workshop

Author of the submission

Santhosh Thottingal

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

Santhosh.thottingal (santhosh dot thottingal at gmail dot com)

Country of origin

India

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Personal homepage or blog

http://thottingal.in

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

Access to the knowledge by breaking the limitations of the communication infrastructure is very important for countries which are still catching up with decent internet connections for people. When massive open knowledge initiatives like wikipedia is growing in one side, there are millions of people who do not have access to this just because they don't have good Internet connections. Malayalam wikipedia started an initiative to reach out the people with its good quality content(second ranking in Page depth among all wikipedia) by releasing selected 500 articles in CD format. And the software used for creating that CD by pulling content from wiki and processing was wiki2cd.

wiki2cd (http://github.com/santhoshtr/wiki2cd) is a tool to create a wikipedia offline version suitable for CD/DVD distribution. It takes a list of topcis as input, pull the pages from internet, process it to make it suitable for offline usage. The resulting CD can be used in any Operating system, with the help of just an internet browser. The tool solves lots of hurdles of non-latin content presentation such as non-support of CD/DVD file system for non-latin file names, non-availability of proper unicode fonts in the system.

The GPL licensed software was successfully used for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 with 500 articles. Within a week, around 5000 ISO images got downloaded. The software is written in very generic way so that it can be used for any language wiki without any effort. It is also customizable to meet the specific needs if any.

The workshop is to introduce the software to people, how to use, how to customize etc. I am also interested in discussing a few challenges of non-latin wiki content presentation with interested developers.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

Infrastructure, People and Community

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

May be

Slides or further information (optional)

http://wiki.github.com/santhoshtr/wiki2cd/

http://thottingal.in/blog/2010/04/17/mlwikioncd/

Interested attendees

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  1. 80686 - maybe we can sync that with Submissions/Wikipedia Offline, as far as I understand this is about gathering the HTML content and updating it (links, templates..) while the Wikipedia Offline work is more about compression, fulltext search and a standardized file format to store the compressed content in a way that allows fast random access also on tiny devices, so I see potential of putting the two things together
  2. Shijualex
  3. Add your username
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