Wikipedia & Linterweb

6 January 2011

What a year!

Filed under: wikiwix — Matthieu @ 15:16

Bloody hell! How fast time has flown! How fast this year 2010 went by! Crazy!

On the other hand, it was not fruitless for us, at Linterweb. We’ve accomplished heaps of things.

For instance, back to the year 2009, Linterweb was still in charge of archiving the external weblinks of Wikipedia, to ensure that the content of those web pages remains available as reference of the article in the future, and this even if the true page has disappeared of the external web site. But then, this archiving wasn’t run on all Wikimedia projects, for all languages.
Now, it’s still not run on all Wikimedia projects, for all languages, but its use is spreading. This service is now run, for instance, on several Wikipedia’s sister projects (the French speaking Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, …), or as well on projects of other languages (like the Hungarian speaking Wikipedia).
Hopefully, this use of the Wikiwix archiving will extend even more, as this service has a huge potential usefulness: many references in articles contain external web links; when those links get broken, the readers can’t check anymore what the external web page says exactly, and the reference is often contested. So that part of the article gets lost, actually, as references are a very important part of the articles. The solution to this problem is to archive all external web pages linked to articles.

Furthermore, Okawix port to Android is almost complete. Okawix is our 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. It will thus be soon possible to take Wikipedia, or any sister project, with you in the pocket of your jacket, on your Android smartphone, and to read it anywhere, at anytime, even without possibility of Internet connection (in the train, in airplanes, in Sahara, in Antarctic…). For iPad, this possibility should be completed soon too, before the end of the first quarter 2011.
Moreover, we are glad and proud that, in a recent email, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales had a word to praise those who, like us, work at making Wikipedia and its sister projects available on offline or mobile devices.

We hope to read from you soon (please let us a comment on our blog) and, naturally, we wish you a Happy New Year!

Take care 🙂 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 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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