Offline Projects/Reports/June 2019

Objectives of the UserGroup

There have been many efforts to distribute offline snapshots to places with little connectivity, via schoolservers, wikireaders, and pocket-sized servers that run on batteries. In 2017, a retreat for offline-wiki developers, users, and deployers was organized by Martin Walker at Potsdam University. In addition, Kiwix has organized hackathons for their toolchain and related use cases for many years. This user group is a shared community for people developing any of these offline related initiatives!

This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018 to

+ Consolidate and support offline snapshots of wiki knowledge, and deployments of them in schools, clinics, and rural communities.

+ Update and maintain the offline projects portal on Meta.

+ Advocate for better distribution of and awareness of offline wikis, in all parts of the world where internet access is restricted, expensive, or unavailable: including schools, clinics, prisons, refugee camps, disaster areas.

Activities since the creation of the UG

Wikipedias in African languages into smart set-top boxes

• From 2018 Wikimedia-ZA has supported a project (ongoing) to get Wikipedias in African languages into smart set-top boxes.

Development of offline distributions with Kiwix

• Legoktm's Kiwix+Debian 2018 report
• Partnership announcement with the Wikimedia Foundation
• New releases for Kiwix-Android
• New releases for Kiwix-iOS
• New releases for Chrome and Firefox extensions
• New Kiwix-desktop Release candidate (Windows / GNU Linux)
• Launch of Raspberry hotspot installer and pre-launch of the online installer
• Launch of Wikipedia subsets (incl. new tile layout): 10 new subsets (maths, physics, chemistry, history, geography, molecular biology, football, basketball, comics, cricket) in a dozen languages. This is the result of new updates to MWoffliner
• Launch of Zimfarm, which allows for monthly(-ish) automated updates of zim files
• Hackathon at Google Zurich (Sept. 2018)

• Subset example: History by Wikipedia
• 
  Chinese
• 
  English
• 
  Hindi
• 
  Turkish

Offline editing with WikiFundi

• July - October 2018: beta version of WikiFundi featured during Wikimania Cap Town in various panels and throughout the poster session. Presentation of WikiFundi during Wikiconvention francophone in France. Several videos released.
• Novembre 2018: WikiFundi V2 release is officially out
• January 2019: release of an explainer video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzcyi9vi82Q&t=23s
• Spring-Summer 2019: WikiFundi presented during Wikimania poster session (new poster, new leaflet) as well as during the Creative Commons Summit in Lisbon

• 
• 
• 

Outreach using offline tools : the WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique

• Writing contest for 9-12 years old in French speaking Africa. Second edition run in school year 2018-2019. 96 articles submitted and published on Vikidia; nearly 500 images on Wikimedia Commons. 65 participating schools from 7 African countries (Madagascar, Mali, Cameroun, Niger, Guinée, Tunisie et Sénégal). Winners announced in June 2019.
• Driving effort is made with schools usually not connected to the internet, with use of local facilitator and our offline toolset (WikiFundi and Kiwix content)
• Blog on Wikimedia France

• 
  Poster summarizing the project, published for Wikimania
• 
  Celebration of a 2017-2018 winner
• 
  Training session in Dakar
• 
  Kid with a tablet on wikifundi

Membership

The UG has been approved in 2018. Below, one may find the original membership list. In Spring 2019, we made a call for renewal (communicated on offline ML as well as on wiki page).

Membership in 2019

• Sj (group contact)
• Anthere (group contact)
• Doc James
• Amqui
• Kiwix
• Legoktm
• Michaelgraaf
• AGomez (WMF)
• Abhinav Srivastava
• Shani Evenstein
• Fawaz Tairou
• Islahaddow
• David Strine
• Mark A. Hershberger
• Daren Welsh
• bluerasberry
• GastelEtzwane
• Wilfredor
• Dang Brazal
• Kaizenify

Initial membership list (members in 2018)

• Sj (group contact)
• rahuldeshmukh101 (group contact)
• Doc James
• AbhiSuryawanshi
• Discott
• Amqui
• Peter Kaminski
• Anthere
• Kiwix
• Legoktm
• Suyash Dwivedi
• Walkerma
• Shypoetess
• Mgautierfr
• Ariel Glenn
• Ανώνυμος Βικιπαιδιστής
• ThurnerRupert
• Michaelgraaf (talk) 13:40, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
• Psychoslave (talk) 18:56, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
• AGomez (WMF)
• Abhinav Srivastava
• Jamie Tubers
• Islahaddow(talk)
• --BamLifa (talk) 13:50, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
• GastelEtzwane (talk) 16:20, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
• Blossom Ozurumba (talk) 16:50, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
• T Cells (talk) 18:14, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
• Kaizenify (talk) 23:34, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Administrative

Affiliation

This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018, by implementers in different countries who found one another and realized that we were not coordinating efforts as well as we might -- and did not know the current status of many important offline projects, as these were not gathered in a single place. The UG was subsequently approved Wikimedians for Offline Wikis

Change of contacts

Initial group contacts

• Sj (group contact)
• rahuldeshmukh101 (group contact)

Group contacts from summer 2019 on

• sj <at> laptop.org
• user:Anthere fdevouard <at> anthere.org

Board elections

The UG cast its vote on 2019 board election

Misc

The group was represented at UserGroup Meetup Lunch at Wikimania 2019 by Anthere

See also

• Reports