El potencial social de Kiwix es inimaginable, ya que pone en contacto directo a cualquier persona/comunidad con información de alta calidad, diversidad y libre en lugares donde no existe acceso a las telecomunicaciones.

Kiwix esta diseñado para poder ser utilizado en situaciones donde los equipos de computo no posean grandes recursos, ya que con el uso del micro-servidor integrado es posible correr una sola copia de Kiwix y la(s) imagen(es) ZIM dentro de una red local, siendo esta característica muy útil dentro de las salsas de computo, bibliotecas, laboratorios, dispositivos móviles, etc. Al unificar el consumo de espacio y procesamiento a un solo equipo.

Esta nueva versión, 0.9.0 beta5, disponible para GNU/Linux, Mac, Windows viene junto con una nueva imagen ZIM de toda la Wikipedia en español.

Sí… leíste bien, toda la enciclopedia Wikipedia ahora esta disponible en imágenes ZIM para Kiwix, esta imagen de ~10 GiB esta disponible desde el sitio web de Kiwix, de misma manera lo esta Wikipedia en otros 24 idiomas.

Ahora ya lo sabes, Kiwix viene con todo este 2012, contamos con tu apoyo y difusión para lograr una nación culta y con acceso a las tecnologías de la información.

Aun hay más proyectos cocinandose dentro de Kiwix, mantente en informado:

• Kiwix Planet
• Kiwix en Identi.ca
• Kiwix en SourceForge

A opinión del autor: Si Kiwix ya es parte de las aplicaciones oficiales educativas en diversos países informáticamente autónomos, ¿por que no puede ser implementada en México, que gastamos miles de millones de pesos en Enciclomedia?.

OpenZIM files can be read in multiple reader applications, the most popular of which is Kiwix, available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Sugar.

Start your BitTorrent client and grab a copy of the 9.7GB file (.torrent link, other download options). You can also download content packages directly from within Kiwix using its library feature, including content from sister projects like Wiktionary and Wikisource, as well as non-Wikimedia content.

While the ZIM file doesn’t include images (that would blow it up to ~100GB for thumbnail-sized images), it does come with all the lists, tables, citations, and even mathematical formulas included in the online version.

Wikimedia content has always been made available under free and open licensing terms in raw copies, but ZIM content packages offer a higher level of convenience for the end user.

Please note that this OpenZIM file was prepared by Emmanuel Engelhart, the developer of Kiwix, and feedback should be directed to him (contact at kiwix dot org) or submitted through the Kiwix feedback system.

Source: “Fuse-Project”; upload to OLPC-Wiki: OLPC user “Walter” (CC-BY-SA-2.5)

In the quest to get the information resource Wikipedia into the hands of the entire world, we are excited to note that the offline Wikipedia reader Kiwix has recently been extended to read offline Wikipedia files on the Sugar operating system!

Sugar is an open source desktop environment specifically customized for children. It runs on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO computers, which are often distributed throughout areas of the world without access to the Internet. Now, the students who get one of these computers will have the ability to access information from the largest open educational resource in the world via a great interface!

Congratulations to developers reg and Kelson and to Wikimedia Switzerland for the execution and funding of this project. We hope to hear many inspiring stories about deployments and use cases! To help beta test, see the downloading options at sugarlabs (be sure to download Sugar first). See the Offline Projects page for a broad overview of Offline Wikipedia and information on how to get involved.

Jessie Wild
Special Projects Manager, Global Development

About Kiwix:

Kiwix is a full featured offline reader for Web content, specifically designed for the Offline Wikipedia projects. It stores the content in the ZIM file format, a highly compressed open format with additional metadata. The project is supported by a host of volunteers led by developers reg and Kelson. Kiwix is free software and offers localized options. For more information, see www.kiwix.org.

Shantabai Ladkat English Medium School, Nanapeth Pune had a unique visitor in November 2011. Emmanuel Engelhart from Switzerland is the creator of a program called "Kiwix" which runs "Wikipedia for Schools", a digital encyclopedia that runs on any computer, has over 6000 articles equal to 20 large encyclopedias. And it is completely free of charge, made to spread to schools for the benefit of teachers and students. 

Our school was one of the first in India to install and use this wealth of knowledge in our computer lab. So Emmanuel came to Pune specially to meet us and spent two full days interacting with all the students and the teachers, seeing his program in action in our lab and he even taught us a little French. We held a special ceremony for him to convey our gratitude for his noble and selfless work in the field of education that can empower millions of students all over the nation.

Seven Indians and a German created an input method for their language. A Russian keyboard method is promised for the next day. There was a jQuery wizard who created a wonderful and necessary addition to the Narayam extension: a visual cue to where the characters are on the keyboard. This information comes directly from the Narayam definitions and the best part is that the visual cue actually works as well.

The WebFonts extension got its reality check. WebFonts provides default fonts in order to ensure that nobody sees the infamous Unicode squares and numbers instead of the desired characters. The MediaWiki software is exclusively open source, and consequently the fonts we deliver through the WebFonts extension need to be freely licensed, too.  The default font we use for the Indic languages is the Lohit font produced by Red Hat. It was quite astonishing to learn that some of the characters are not what the character should look like. Bugs have been filed for this at Red Hat and more work will be done.

We are going to roll out the WebFonts extension on December 12th. Our aim is to install it on the Indic projects. When we have freely licensed fonts that show languages correctly, we will finally be able to provide readable content to everyone. We will be working towards resolving the issues identified at the hackathon.

The Mumbai hackathon has also been good for the Kiwix off-line reader; not only was the software localised into several languages, new developers also familiarized themselves with the software itself to implement further improvements. This is quite important because many Indian people have no or intermittent access to the Internet. In addition to Wikipedia content, there are many projects in India to transcribe books that are in the public domain; as the Kiwix software gets ready to support this content, it will help more and more people get access to India’s rich cultural heritage.

Mobile support was the third centre of gravity; many first-time Wikimedia hackers teamed up with seasoned Wikimedia developers and this produced great results. This included work on a mobile landing page for India, as well as a gateway that allows users to receive Wikipedia articles over SMS and the carrier-specific USSD technology. To appreciate this, many people do not have access to the Internet and consequently to our content. Work also continued on the “Wikipedia Zero” project, which aims to bring Wikipedia and other Wikimedia content to millions of users without data charges.

We also saw an interesting connection with the October 2011 Coding Challenge. Developer Yuvipanda implemented Android 2.2 support for one of the coding challenge submissions, the “Share with Wikimedia Commons” Android app (as well as for the official Wikipedia Android app).

All this will get some review, maybe some polishing but we are quite eager to bring this functionality to you.

Many of the hackers were new to MediaWiki. With an introduction by Erik and private tutoring by Sumana, Tomasz, Patrick, and others, several people really got into the swing of things to the extent that some bugs were smashed.  The hackathon proved as always that when you bring great people together special things can and do happen.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

• to bring the necessity of localisation to the front
• to support the localisation of MediaWiki and Kiwix
• to make the MediaWiki projects more usable

Comme dit le diction On n'est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi même, je lançais donc le projet par moi même.

Où en sommes-nous aujourd'hui :

• L'intérêt pour l'accès à nos contenus hors-ligne est plus grand que jamais. Kiwix et openZIM occupent une place de choix parmi les solutions techniques proposées.
• Nous avons maintenant une solution tout à fait viable pour Windows, OSX et GNU/Linux avec pas mal de fonctionnalités intéressantes. Bref, nous sommes bien plus loin que nos objectifs initiaux.
• Kiwix a fusionné complètement avec Moulinwiki et nous sommes désormais un peu plus nombreux à travailler sur le logiciel, même si nous sommes vraiment encore trop peu.
• Nous avons une audience honorable et en croissance constante avec au dernier recensement environ 300 visiteurs uniques et 120 téléchargements du logiciel par jour.
• Kiwix est soutenu par plusieurs chapters très concrètement et par la WMF, ainsi que des organisations extérieures au mouvement.

Sur quoi travaillons nous :

• Nous voulons sortir la version 0.9 finale d'ici la fin de l'année et investissons beaucoup pour améliorer l'ergonomie du logiciel et sa stabilité.
• On cherche en parallèle à augmenter le nombre de plateformes supportées avec plus de binaires, des packages et de nouveaux ports (pour Sugar par exemple, mais nous tentons aussi de trouver des solutions pour Android).
• Nous voulons aussi absolument améliorer la version serveur http de Kiwix et développer une solution clef-en-main pour Plug computers.
• Améliorer la communication et faire participer plus de gens (amélioration du site Web, meilleur communication avec l'aide de la WMF, utilisation de Translatewiki, mise en place d'un système de Feedback, …).
• Développer des outils pour rendre la création de ZIM beaucoup plus simple.
• Documenter et faciliter les déploiements massifs de Kiwix.

Face à tous ces challenges, il faut tous ensemble faire un effort et toutes les bonnes volontés sont le bienvenu. Pour ma part je travaillerai à partir d'octobre à temps plein sur Kiwix.