Wikimedia blog

Offline use of Wikimedia content is a strategic goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. Kiwix is an offline app that allows user to read content without an internet connection, and it can now be localized into many languages on translatewiki.net.

There are many instances where people do not have an Internet connection available, or where it is cheaper to work offline, notably in the “Global south”.

Data from Wikimedia projects can be exported to the openZIM format, and then read offline on Kiwix, the only openZIM client.

Several projects with local developers invested a considerable amount of time creating their own offline app for their language, their script or for special requirements like formatting for books.

With the localization of Kiwix on translatewiki.net, it is now much more of an option to work on such features in Kiwix. Customizations like including fonts with a package or having specific formatting for a book or a source remain possible.

We hope our community will help localize Kiwix in the 270+ languages we currently support with Wikimedia projects. Please start translating the interface and let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

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