Wikipedia & Linterweb

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We spent the week end of November, 22th in Germany, where took place an openZIM developer meeting.

The openZIM project aims to define a new standard for the archiving of Wikimedia content. Based on the ZIM standard, the openZIM format will be open source, so that the users will be given the possibility to browse ZIM files with a variety of ZIM able readers.

Okawix currently uses the Zeno format, which has been a precursor to the ZIM format. Our participation in this meeting aimed to decide if it could be of interest to us to integrate the ZIM format into Okawix, or even to switch from Zeno to ZIM in all of our Wikipedia-related applications.

Indeed, in addition to the development of Okawix, our company, Linterweb, also makes available for download archives of the various Wikipedia projects, in all languages. Presently, those archives are available uniquely as Zeno files, either directly through the Okawix user interface or as BitTorrent links. A switch to an exclusive use of the ZIM format would therefore mean much more to us than a mere integration into Okawix, it would mean deep, substantial changes to the architecture of our applications.

However, after careful consideration, we decided to take the plunge: not only are we going to integrate the ZIM format into Okawix, but we are also going to generate and make available ZIM files. Of course, good things take time, and such changes won’t happen overnight, but the integration into Okawix of the ZIM format should be complete by the end of the year, and ZIM archives of Wikipedia should be available for download by the end of the first trimester 2010.

The openZIM project is approved by the Wikimedia Foundation; it will thus be, after our collaboration with TranslateWiki, our second collaboration with a project supported by Wikimedia.

Yours sincerely, Guillaume, Linterweb developer.

Linterweb is a web company that, for now several years, has been developing various Wikipedia oriented programs, including:

• Wikiwix, a semantic web search engine that gives only results out of the databases of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects; My Wikiwix, your own search engine for your own website; wikiwix.mobi, a mobile version of Wikiwix;
  
• Okawix, the offline Wikipedia browser free of copyrights and free of charge that allows you to read offline archives of the articles of the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, as well as archives of your own website; those archives are available for download on the website of Okawix;
  
• a DVD of around 2000 articles from the English speaking Wikipedia; a USB flash drive that contains the version 0.7 of the English speaking Wikipedia;
• a program that archives the external web pages of the Wikipedia articles (that is, the web pages outside Wikipedia but linked from a Wikipedia article), so that their content remain available and that those external links don’t get broken; this program is used automatically, in particular, for all external links of the French speaking Wikipedia.
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Dear all,

We are proud to announce that, this year again, Linterweb and Wikiwix are supporting the fund raising campaigns of several local Wikimedia associations.
These local fund raising campaigns are taking place right now, at the same time as the global fund raising of the global Wikimedia Foundation.

Linterweb and Wikiwix support these local fund raising campaigns… The logos of the various local Wikimedia associations are added to the Wikiwix search result pages.
If you click on these logos, the webpage of the fund raising campaign of the corresponding local Wikimedia association is then displayed.

Right now, the local Wikimedia associations concerned by this support are those of the following countries:

• Hungary,
• Italy,
• France,
• Switzerland,
• Austria,
• Germany,
• the Netherlands.

Other local Wikimedia associations from other countries may be added in the near future.

Your donation will help to operate the Wikimedia projects and to relate them to your contry.
Among other things, your donation will finance local projects of promotion and diffusion of the contents produced by the Wikimedia community.

We look forward to your donation and to the success of this fund raising campaign,

Sincerely yours, Matthieu.

Linterweb is a web company that, for now several years, has been developing various Wikipedia oriented programs, including:

• Wikiwix, a semantic web search engine that gives only results out of the databases of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects; My Wikiwix, your own search engine for your own website; wikiwix.mobi, a mobile version of Wikiwix;
  
• Okawix, the offline Wikipedia browser free of copyrights and free of charge that allows you to read offline the articles of the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, as well as archives of your own website;
  
• a DVD of around 2000 articles from the English speaking Wikipedia; a USB flash drive that contains the version 0.7 of the English speaking Wikipedia;
• a program that archives the external web pages of the Wikipedia articles (that is, the web pages outside Wikipedia but linked from a Wikipedia article), so that their content remain available and that those external links don’t get broken; this program is used automatically, in particular, for all external links of the French speaking Wikipedia.
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Hello everybody,

Recently we (I mean the people who work at Linterweb) have had the surprise to read here and there in a couple of comments or articles that Okawix would regrettably not be a free software. How and why this has been written, is for us great mystery.

Therefore, we’d like to make it completely clear that Okawix IS an absolutely and entirely free software… As free as a bird!!

Okawix, the off-line Wikipedia reader that has been developed by our company, Linterweb, was released officially on the 13th of July 2009, while Okawix’ source code was released on the 9th of the same month; that is, before Okawix’ publication…

More accurately, Okawix is available under the GPL version 2 License, (i.e., among other things, the software is free of copyright and free of charge, and anyone interested may view the source code at the address http://sourceforge.net/projects/okawix/ and edit it).

Okawix uses the Mozilla technologies (XUL / Javascript, XPCOM components written in C++) and can be run on the popular Linux operating system, as well as on the Windows or MacOS operating systems.

Okawix can be downloaded for free from Internet at the following address: http://www.okawix.com/. If your connection is slow, our website allows you too to buy USB flash drives with on it Okawix and all articles of the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, in one or several languages of your choice (all of Wikipedia, all of Wikisource, … with the pictures).

It was worth to be said, wasn’t it?

So, have much free fun with our free Okawix software take care, Matthieu.

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Dear all,

We’ve got several news for you about Okawix, the off-line Wikipedia reader that was developed by the web company Linterweb, and whose search engine is our other program Wikiwix.

First of all, Linterweb is going once again to collaborate with the English speaking Wikipedia 1.0 community. The Wikipedia 1.0 projects plan to implement content review, to produce a filtered snapshot of the English speaking Wikipedia, to publish a core set of articles thanks to a selection based on a combination of importance and quality. This project is still under way. A first 0.5 version containing a collection of almost 2,000 core articles has been released in April 2007. Well… The news is that the next version, the version 0.7, containing this time around 31,000 articles, is about to be released in the form of a .okawix archive, so that you will be able to download the .okawix archive of the version 0.7 through the use of the Okawix software, or directly from our Okawix.com website. Then the software Okawix will allow you to read the articles of the Wikipedia 0.7 off-line, or, among other things, to find specific articles with the help of our integrated Wikiwix search engine, …

Secondly, I’m happy to announce that new languages have been added to the Okawix software. It was of course already possible to get the contents of the various Wikimedia projects in all the available languages of the Wikimedia, that is, about 253 different languages (!). But the user interface, that until now was only available in French, German, Spanish and English, will be from now on available in the twelve following languages: not any more only French, German, Spanish and English, but in addition Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Japanese. By the way, we’d like to express a huge thank you! to the members of the translatewiki.net community for all the work they have done for those user interface translations!!!

Furthermore, I’m glad to announce that a documentation has been added to the Okawix software, too. Unfortunately, this documentation is so far only available in French, but it will be soon available in more languages!

Last but not least, you’ll note that several bugs have been corrected, including a quite annoying one that caused Okawix to crash during the download of big .okawix archives (e.g. the archive file of the English speaking Wikipedia…).

Well, if you would like to learn more about Okawix, we encourage you to visit and read our blog, especially the article “Introduction to Okawix“.

Enjoy your time with Okawix!

Yours sincerely , Matthieu.

• French
• German

Linterweb is pleased to announce that its offline Wikipedia browser Okawix has just been added to the list of the projects whose translation is supported by translatewiki.net, a localisation platform for open source projects.

This means that, from now on, Okawix translation will be taken in charge by the members of the translatewiki.net community.

We’d like to thank very much Nike and Siebrand, who run the translatewiki.net project, as well as the numerous members of the translatewiki.net community (among others Michawiki, ‎Fryed-peach, Hosiryuhosi, Naudefj, Umherirrender, Bennylin, ‎Александр Сигачёв, Toliño, Kiranmayee, Purodha, Fulup, Cedric31) who have  startedtwo days ago to deal with the translation in already more than 10 different languages.

If you wish to help, don’t hesitate to go onto the home page of the Okawix translation project, that you will find here: http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Okawix.

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Okawix lets you download all of Wikipedia articles, with or without the pictures, so that you can read them off-line.

With Okawix you will be able to browse the articles of Wikipedia, as well as those of its sister projects (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, …) in 253 languages.

Okawix offers you also the possibility to perform searches on these articles through the search engine Wikiwix, produced by the software company Linterweb.

Okawix, developed by the same company, Linterweb, is a software initially designed to read the articles of the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikisource, …; but Okawix is in reality able to read any HTML document).

One of its characteristics is that it allows you to store effortlessly all articles of a given Wikimedia project (Wikipedia, …) on any data storage medium (e.g. the hard drive of your computer, a CD, or a USB flash drive), and then to browse the articles off-line (that is, once you have copied the articles of a project from, for instance, Internet, or from a CD, you can see these articles without being connected to the Internet).

Furthermore, you can choose to copy the articles with or without the pictures (in order to reduce the  space required for the storage of the articles).

Okawix is distributed under the GNU General Public License (ie, among other things, the software is free, and anyone interested may view the source code at the address http://sourceforge.net/projects/okawix/ and edit it).

Okawix uses the Mozilla technologies (XUL / Javascript, XPCOM components written in C++) and can be run on the popular Linux operating system, as well as on the Windows or MacOS operating systems.

Okawix can be downloaded for free from Internet at the following address: http://www.okawix.com/. If your connection is slow, our website allows you too to buy USB flash drives with on it Okawix and all articles of the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, in one or several languages of your choice (all of Wikipedia, all of Wikisource, … with the pictures).