Wikipedia & Linterweb

You already know Wikiwix, the search engine run by the web company Linterweb that gives only results out of the databases of the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Today, Linterweb is pleased to introduce you My Wikiwix. My Wikiwix, by using the technologies initially developed for the searches on the Wikimedia projects with Wikiwix, allows you to have a search engine for your own website.

To perform searches on your website, My Wikiwix, like Wikiwix, uses semantic search technologies, in order to generate more relevant results.

In addition, My Wikiwix allows you some control over the way in which the results are displayed by letting you create up to 255 categories ; you can then specify to which category a particular page belongs to, by the introduction of an invisible meta tag in the source code of this web page. You can also directly categorize all together a whole set of web pages whose URL complies with a particular pattern. Thereafter, with just one click, a search can be restricted to the pages of a particular category.

To set up your My Wikiwix search engine, you must first sign up on this web page: http://my.wikiwix.com/index.php.

Next, with the email address and the password that you have given for the registration, you’ll be able to log in and access to the creation form that allows you to ask for the set up of your My Wikiwix search engine.

Once your My Wikiwix search engine has been set up by our team, to connect you on this same web page will allow you to access the search engine management tools.

My Wikiwix is part of a set of web applications programmed by Linterweb, including the research engine Wikiwix, that performs its search exclusively amongst the articles of the Wikimedia foundation, the Wikipedia offline browser Okawix, and a DVD of around 2000 articles from the English speaking Wikipedia.

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 remains 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 remains 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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