Wikipedia & Linterweb

We’ve got some 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 collaborating once again with the English speaking Wikipedia 1.0 community. The Wikipedia 1.0 project plans 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. Then, another pre-version, the version 0.7, containing around 31,000 articles, was released quite a while ago. Well… The news is that the next version, the version 0.8, containing this time around 47,300 articles, has now been released in the form of a .okawix archive, so that you can download the .okawix archive of the version 0.8 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 0.8 off-line, or, among other things, to find specific articles with the help of our integrated Wikiwix search engine, …

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.

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.
• …

The version 0.8 of the English speaking Wikipedia on the archive download page of Okawix

As announced a few weeks ago, a beta version of Okawix for Android, iPhone and iPad will be soon available.
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, iPhone or iPad device, and to read it anywhere, at any time, even without possibility of Internet connection (in the train, in air planes, in Sahara, in Antarctic…).

In addition, we”re thinking about the possibility to set up a new portal with various contents available for download. Which archives will be available on this portal, we”re not quite sure yet: for sure, you”ll find archives of Wikipedia (in all available languages) as well as of its sister projects (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks…). Likely, you”ll find also archives of Wikisource set by author. And the books of the PediaPress Portal. And a whole bunch of taurus horoscope love people have always taken very seriously their partners’ choices. web sites available under the CC-by-sa license. And, in a private directory, archives of any web site and of your Wikimarks account.

Now, we”re looking for beta testers, dead or alive!! But alive would be better 🙂 We”d like you to test our offline Wikipedia browser on your Android, iPhone or iPad devices, and tell us the small bugs and your good ideas of improvement of this new service. If you want to help us, please leave a comment under this articles on our blog (please give your true email address in the form, so that we can contact you).

We hope to read your feed back soon,

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.

Until recently, Wikiwix, the search engine run by the web company Linterweb, gave only results out of Wikimedia projects. But we now want to give you the possibility to also perform, thanks to Wikiwix, searches on social network and bookmarking accounts (Delicious, Netvibes, Twitter, Google Reader, Identi.ca, Digg, and so on). It’s a new service, and it’s called Wikimarks.

Let’s suppose that you want to perform searches on , for instance, one or several Twitter or Delicious accounts. Then you need to go to the Wikimarks login page: http://wikiwix.com/wikimarks/index.php.

You’ll have first to set up a new account (nothing easier, you just have to enter a mail address and choose a password for this new account).

Now you can log in. You enter into your Wikimarks settings area. Click on the link Manage your external bookmarks.

On this page you can manage which social network accounts you want to be performed on: for instance, if you want to perform searches through the Twitter account named Wikipedia, you just have to write Wikipedia in the corresponding box and click onto the Add button (you don’t even need to have personally your own Twitter account, you can add any Twitter account, that is, any Twitter user name on the account of whom you’ll want to perform searches). Next, Wikimarks indexes all pages that have been tweeted on this Wikipedia account, and you can subsequently perform searches restricted to these pages. You can of course also add more accounts of various websites: Delicious, Twitter, Identica, Digg. You can also add simple RSS feeds, as well as OPML web page lists (OPML is a file format, that is among others used by web sites such as Google Reader or Netvibes; so that you can add and perform searches on your Google Reader or Netvibes feeds).

Now you are ready to perform searches: type search terms in the search box (at the right bottom of the page), and hit Enter on your keyboard or click the Search button to display the results page.

So, now you have customized your search engine and you can restrict your searches to your favourite Streams.

The current version of Wikimarks is still a beta version, and a lot has to be done yet, but we hope you’ll want to give it a try and let us know your feed back on our blog.

Next time I’ll speak of possible applications of Wikimarks.

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.
• …

Last week there has been a very unfortunate incident with the cache system used, in particular, by the French speaking Wikipedia, cache system run by the web company Linterweb, and that allows to keep archives of external links used as footnotes inside articles.
What happened is that someone, while reading the article La_Quatrième Prophétie, checked the archive of the first footnote, thus getting the page saved in the cache system of our search engine Wikiwix. So far, all is normal.

Above the page displayed as it had been saved in our cache, we put some kind of information, like the URL of the archived page, the day the page was saved in our cache, how to contact us, how the webmaster of the site can prevent his site to be archived… in addition, for a few week, we had been adding the three top links of our Results in the recent web search engine new feature. These links are not ads. There are just links recently posted on Twitter, and related to the archived page, as determined by our search engine. Click-throughs do not generate revenues for Linterweb. These links are generated by our twitter-search algorithm which we are putting in place in order to return interesting up-to-the-minute results around search terms or, in our case, around the archived page. You can see an example of this twitter search service here: http://wikiwix.com/index.php?disp=!twitter/en/&action=Wikipedia. The basic idea is that we want to show users material that is recent and fresh around their search term of interest or related to the archived page. We’d like to make it clear that we don’t make any money on it. The feature was just meant to enhance the cache service we provide to the French speaking Wikipedia.

Well, what happened is that the first of these three top Results in the recent web led actually to a football site (site apparently somehow related for some reason to the archived page, as determined by our twitter-search algorithm), site on which were displayed sexy ads.

Thus, dogged by bad luck (Wikipedia -> Wikiwix archive -> somehow related tweeted link -> football site -> sexy ad), our unfortunate user reached content not related with Wikipedia, and certainly inappropriate.

We feel sorry about that. We feel of course all the more concerned that, beside this collaboration with the French Wikipedia on the archiving and search engine system, we also provide some search engine services to Vikidia, a Wikipedia like encyclopaedia intended for children from 8 to 13 years old!!! :-S You probably understand now how much we feel concerned by possible problems of this nature (however, I’d like also to remind the possibility to install a parental control software; see the Wikipedia article Parental controls and its external links for more information).

We are working on a way to improve our algorithm so that it doesn’t show results that could lead to inappropriate content. In the meantime, we have disabled the feature.

If you have any comment, feel free to leave a message on our blog.

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.
• …

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.
• …