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Offline Projects/Reports/June 2024

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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 FY 2023-2024

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Kiwix

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Kiwix' growth continues at ca. 10-12 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
  • Bunch of releases on all platforms (except Desktop).
  • Work on mediawiki offliner continues unabated. We successfully negotiated the WMF's changes to its API.
  • We released a new Imager for the Hotspot. It is both faster and able to generate much larger images (up to 1 TB).
  • We now have a full, dedicated toolchain that allows us to create custom apps based off a specific zim file. Watch this space (and see below).
Content
  • All medical custom apps are up to date, with a few newcomers: Bollywood (based off the Indian cinema Wikiproject), Arabic Wiktionary, German WikiVoyage, and AfConPedia - an seasonal app dedicated to the African Cup of Nations which we designed with the support of the Ivory Coast User Group. Overall we sense there is a lot of potential for this type of "snackable" content and are very open to new ideas.
  • Wikipedia-on-demand is also a thing! It is still a soft release (ie no formal annoucement as the tool can still be improved upon, but it basically anyone with a Wikimedia account to generate a zim file based off a custom list of articles or a specific Wikiproject (e.g. London, which in turn would give a zim file with all London-related Wikipedia entries as defined by the Project).
Varia
  • There is now a newsletter to inform folks about new content releases as well as tech updates. Sign up is here.
  • We released v.2.0 of the Zimit scraper, which allows ziming (if that's a word) of a much broader range of content (listing this under "Varia" as this typically applies to non-Wikimedia content).
Hackathons
  • Our first hackathon ever in actual Switzerland, where we're supposedly based. Lots of meta discussion to better manage content expansion.

WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique

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Poster at Wikimania

The WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique is a training and writing program designed for schools in French (initially) 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 2023-2024 along similar lines than previous years : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique with the addition of an English speaking country this year, Sierra Leone !

In 2023-24, the programme is implemented in 9 countries (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea Conakry, Madagascar, Mali, RdC, Senegal, Tunisia and Sierra Leone). The 12 winning establishments were announced on June 18, 2024 in Rabat, Morocco, during SIEL. All together, 151 articles were submitted and published on Vikidia. 715 photos et vidéos have been submitted by the children to Commons.

The contest was also featured on a poster during Wikimania in Singapore.

To read more

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

  •  
    Communication visual
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    Another visual
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    Krio dress in Sierra Leone (winning article)
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    Winners announcement
  • Video in a tunisian market
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    A few students
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    In the classroom
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    Students and art craft
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    International ceremony
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    Winning ceremony in Burkina Faso

Wiki Project Med

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We have upgraded our IIABs to 256 Gb uSD cards and Raspberry Pi Zero W 2s. We have partnered with the Wikipedia Store regarding distribution and we sold out within a few days or launching.[1] We are distributing to the store at 40 USD and the store adds 18 USD plus shipping. Efforts to increase production are ongoing and we are discussing adding further options.

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MCDC @SJ

Communication

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Membership in 2023-2024

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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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