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Re: [Kiwix-developer] Kiwix and Evopedia (another offline wikipedia reader)
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From: Emmanuel E. <ke...@ki...> - 2015-04-18 11:39:07
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Dear Christian Thank you for writing to us! On 18.04.2015 12:44, chr...@ev... wrote: > I'm writing on behalf of the developers of Evopedia, another free and > open source offline Wikipedia reader: http://www.evopedia.info > Its goals are more or less aligned with those of Kiwix, but it uses > another archive format. > The project is currently stale, mainly because of a lack of > contributors, and we would actually like to recommend Kiwix as a perfect > alternative to Evopedia to our community. The Kiwix team, of course, knows about the Evopedia project which is a really interesting and good software from many point-of-views (from my personal point-of-view, your work around FFOS or Qt is in particular of interest). It's sad to read that you face a (hopefully temporary) lack of resources, but this is a problem we know pretty well too. > But still, some community members value some features of Evopedia which > Kiwix does not provide (to our knowledge): > 1. Evopedia scans Wikipedia articles for geo coordinates and can > show "articles around you" and some versions also support a map of articles We want this feature too, here is the corresponding ticket: https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/feature-requests/910/ Here would be an approach to achieve to do that in a clean manner: * Allow search by geo-localisation in ZIM file, ie. improve the ZIM-spec and zimlib: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96470 (***) * Fix mwoffliner to correctly deal with geo-coordinates: https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/feature-requests/846/ (*) * Fix zimwriterfs to correctly parse HTML <head> geo-coordinates (*) * Finally implement the "nearby" function in Kiwix for Android (*) The map of article should work out-of-the-box then (we just need to use openlayer or similar). > 2. Evopedia has a javascript implementation of the archive format > reader, which allows to run it on Firefox OS (see > https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/evopedia, and the source code: > https://github.com/mossroy/evopedia-html5). It should allow to run it on > virtually any device/OS with the same code (through Apache Cordova: it > has been only partially implemented so far). FFOS is from our point of view probably the most promising development in the mobile sector since a long time. We are really interesting by having a Kiwix version for FFOS. That said we don't have invested a lot of time until now on it. We were in touch with someone who had done a ZIM reader in javascript and this was working. The problem was the performance... but we have already in mind a few improvements which should be able to improve the situation. To conclude: FFOS is a really strategic move we have to do, but for now and in 2015, there is no real plan to work on that. > What are your thoughts on these features? Are they planned (or perhaps > even already present)? If no, what would you think about adding them to > Kiwix? If we find some time ourselves, would you support us adding those > features? Like you probably know, Kiwix is mostly a volunteer driven project, so anybody is more than welcome, in particular for this kind of features are really important ones. Kind regards Emmanuel -- Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more * Web: http://www.kiwix.org * Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline * more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication |