gnosygnu

8 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Hey. I just happened to check this thread and saw your response. To answer your question, yes: the image databases were prepared with expectations of a standard Wikimedia wiki. These wikis have a standard file layout of wikipedia/wikid
2. 2.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Source control is an interesting analogy. In the same vein, when a user syncs their version with the main branch, there will be hundreds of thousands of changes to review. It'll be pretty harrowing for anyone to figure out what to keep
3. 3.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Yeah, but they're working on incremental updates, so this should make the "from scratch" part much easier. You can look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Incremental_dumps and http://lists.wik
4. 4.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   This is an interesting idea. When Wikimedia finalizes an incremental backup solution, it may be possible. They'll release a dump with incremental additions / updates / deletions. You would then have XOWA accept the additions
5. 5.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Thanks for giving it a try. Kiwix is definitely more polished in UI, especially as it has been around for 5+ years. I'd like to think that though XOWA isn't as friendly UI wise, it offers a lot more power / options. Regarding
6. 6.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Yup. It also has its own DOM, rather than continuously adding to one string and repeatedly running regex's on it (which is what MediaWiki does today). I was already pretty far along with my own parser before Parsoid was usable though.
7. 7.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Thanks. The syntax was challenging, especially all the template syntax ("{{my_template|{{{argument1|defaultvalue|{{nested_template}}}}}}}"). Fortunately, the new lua module should eventually replace the template syntax, which shou
8. 8.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Yes, this would be the ideal approach, but it can become quite complicated (b/c the tool-chain needs to be installed for different machines). In addition, the official.xml importer (importDump.php) is not really up to the task (slow &#
9. 9.▲
   by gnosygnu 13y ago

   Ahh.... That's pretty devious. I was thinking of blocking the entire article, not rewriting content. Still not worth the work IMHO, but who knows what censorship servants would do.
10. 10.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    If you're interested, they update the calculation for printed pages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes . I think the estimate is for 1.9 million pages Also, there was another page along t
11. 11.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    That's pretty impressive. I never had the patience to sit through a full MediaWiki import for en.wikipedia.org. Just to be clear, XOWA isn't an installer for MediaWiki, but it's own app. This allows it to avoid the dependency
12. 12.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    Agreed. However, I think it would be less work for them to block access through firewall policy, than to remove them from XOWA. By and large, for most private individuals, an offline app would allow them to evade censorship. I'd hope t
13. 13.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    Good observation, but I just want to point out that the full dumps are downloaded from different servers. They are even mirrored by other institutions. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_...
14. 14.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    Kiwix's Android app and the full-text search are both great features. However, I'll point out that Kiwix has not updated English Wikipedia since January 2012. Also, XOWA works directly with the Wikimedia dumps ( http://d
15. 15.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    Fair enough. It takes about 2 - 3 hours to download for me (standard US residential connection). I sometimes let it run overnight.
16. 16.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    I personally use it for traveling. There are a few other applications as well: - low-bandwidth availability, particularly in less-developed regions of the world - censorship evasion - security concerns. some users want to access Wikipedia w
17. 17.▲
    by gnosygnu 13y ago

    You can try the low-space import. There are instructions in XOWA at home/wiki/Help:Options/Import. It takes longer (8-10 hours) but only needs 35 - 40 GB. (which is still a lot). In the end, you're still going to need ab
18. 18.▲
    Open-source app releases first complete copy of English Wikipedia with images(xowa.sourceforge.net)

    85 points by gnosygnu 13y ago|74 comments