Come beta test offline Wikipedia

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I’m happy to report that we have a new beta version of Kiwix available for testing. For those new to the project, Kiwix is the simplest and easiest way to take Wikipedia with you when you have no internet connection.
We’ve added some features that I’ll talk about below but for those of you that are just looking to get involved: download a fresh copy and give us feedback. Head over to our project pages if you want to see our full roadmap.
With this new beta we have some exciting new features:

  • Mac OS X version;
  • Content Manager
  • Revised search interface

While the majority of our user base is Linux and Windows we didn’t want OSX users to feel left out. It’s now part of our regular build process. Three platform builds per release .. that’s our goal.
We’re especially happy with how the content manager has turned out. Rather than having to scour the internet to find openZim files you’ll now be able to discover new ones right within Kiwix.
We’re starting out with a limited set of data files to simplify our testing, but we’ll be expanding in the next months as we connect the download manager to the Books collection extension. This will greatly expand the amount of content you can download from Wikipedia. With the extra content, we’ll also add filtering capabilities to make sorting easier.

Finally, we’ve tweaked the look and feel of search results. It’s now far more similar to search engine results pages, which will hopefully make both search and browse much easier.There are also lots of others change under the hood and for those curious head over to the change log.
Tomasz Finc
Director Mobile & Special Projects

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Kiwix really is something brilliant! I’m doing practical training in a development project in Ghana and the cost of internet connection is one of the major obstacles for getting information in e.g. rural areas. We’re already planning to have one rural community equipped with Kiwix+WP0.8, let’s see how it works out.

Awesome project, Attu! Please keep us all informed about the work you are doing in Ghana – the Offline Projects pages are a perfect place to do that, or via the offline-l distribution list. Please let us know how we can support your efforts!

[…] Wikipedia made its name as an online encyclopedia. Of course, not everyone can be online all the time. So I was interested to read that Wikipedia is beta testing an offline version. […]