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/wikidomain/thumb/hash0/hash01/name_of_file/thumbnail_file/; EX: wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg/270px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg.
If you're using a MediaWiki installation, your files should be laid out similarly. You can change the XOWA config file to explicitly specify this WMF layout. XOWA allows the user to work directly with the WMF tarballs, so this should work for you as well. You can look at this thread for another user's attempts: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/general_archived/t... If you have questions, feel free to ask / post.
The other alternative is that XOWA should have the ability to read from a non-Wikimedia directory. Another user asked for this for his own private wiki: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/tickets/159/. In this scenario, you'd have all your files in some root directory (C:\images) and XOWA would index the directory and look-up the file by filename. You would probably need imageMagick and inkscape installed though.
Regarding your other point: I will probably centralize all the directories, instead of spreading them out between /wiki/, /file/, /user/. I had a reason for this layout, but it's causing confusion among a few users. You could always zip the files with relative paths, and instruct the users to unzip the zip. For example, the XOWA wikiquote package is one zip file: https://archive.org/details/Xowa_enwikiquote_2013-11-19_comp.... If you unzip it in the /xowa/ dir, it will automatically put all files into relevant folders
In the end, if you have a routine set up for kiwix, you're probably best sticking with it. Keep in mind that XOWA does offer some other nice features that you may / may not need. (editable wiki pages; Wikimedia Lua code). It also offers a lot customization. For example, one of the users added Mathjax to XOWA on his own. (he then proceeded to add a lot more: sorting / collapsing, wikidata skin, redlinks, etc.)
Let me know if you're interested, and I'll see what I can do to help. Otherwise, thanks for the use case scenario. It's definitely something I'll consider supporting in the future!
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 / reject. Just something to consider.
Anyway, thanks for the food for thought as well as your suggestion. I added donation links for archive.org and wikipedia tonight.
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 / updates, but ignore all the deletions.
It would place more responsibility on the user to maintain their copy of the dump though.
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 images. There is some assembly acquired, but I tried to make the instructions as simple as possible. If you look at http://xowa.sourceforge.net/setup_simplewiki.html, then there should be two steps:
* Download the .7z file from from archive.org: http://archive.org/details/Xowa_simplewiki_2013-10-30_images...
* Unzip the .7z file to your XOWA directory. If you're on Windows and have C:\xowa as your folder, you should get a file called C:\xowa\file\simple.wikipedia.org\fsdb.main\fsdb.abc.sqlite3 as well as many others
enwiki is a little more difficult, but only in that it requires downloading more files.
Let me know if you run into other issues. I'm going off to work now, but I'll check again later.
EDIT: I forgot to add that if you set up ImageMagick and Inkscape (installation instructions are on XOWA's Main_Page), you can download images dynamically for each article (i.e.: you don't need to download the entire image dump first)
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 should make it easier for future parsers.
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 / sometimes buggy).
If you're interested in going this route, you can look at http://www.nongnu.org/wp-mirror/. This should build a local MediaWiki instance with one click. Keep in mind that it's a bit slow: it takes two days to build simple.wikipedia.org with images. In contrast, XOWA sets this up in about 30 min
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.
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 on the entire MediaWiki tool-chain (apache, php, mysql, MediaWiki). Unfortunately, this means that XOWA has to reproduce the same logic, which is quite a challenge...
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 that this benefit outweighs the risk of the other's abuse.
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://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html) so it's (a) always up to date and (b) can work on any wiki (Kiwix needs to release the zim file first)
Also, XOWA can run from an external SD card (including FAT32 formatted ones)
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 about 25 GB for English Wikipedia. If you want something smaller, you can try one of the other wikis (for example, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, etc.) Each of these are generally about 5 GB.
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/wikidomain/thumb/hash0/hash01/name_of_file/thumbnail_file/; EX: wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg/270px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg.
If you're using a MediaWiki installation, your files should be laid out similarly. You can change the XOWA config file to explicitly specify this WMF layout. XOWA allows the user to work directly with the WMF tarballs, so this should work for you as well. You can look at this thread for another user's attempts: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/general_archived/t... If you have questions, feel free to ask / post.
The other alternative is that XOWA should have the ability to read from a non-Wikimedia directory. Another user asked for this for his own private wiki: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/tickets/159/. In this scenario, you'd have all your files in some root directory (C:\images) and XOWA would index the directory and look-up the file by filename. You would probably need imageMagick and inkscape installed though.
Regarding your other point: I will probably centralize all the directories, instead of spreading them out between /wiki/, /file/, /user/. I had a reason for this layout, but it's causing confusion among a few users. You could always zip the files with relative paths, and instruct the users to unzip the zip. For example, the XOWA wikiquote package is one zip file: https://archive.org/details/Xowa_enwikiquote_2013-11-19_comp.... If you unzip it in the /xowa/ dir, it will automatically put all files into relevant folders
In the end, if you have a routine set up for kiwix, you're probably best sticking with it. Keep in mind that XOWA does offer some other nice features that you may / may not need. (editable wiki pages; Wikimedia Lua code). It also offers a lot customization. For example, one of the users added Mathjax to XOWA on his own. (he then proceeded to add a lot more: sorting / collapsing, wikidata skin, redlinks, etc.)
Let me know if you're interested, and I'll see what I can do to help. Otherwise, thanks for the use case scenario. It's definitely something I'll consider supporting in the future!