SourceForge is proud to announce the February 2013 Project of the Month, Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader.

I recently spoke with Emmanuel Engelhart, one of the developers on the project.

Rich: Congratulations on winning the SourceForge Project of the Month for

February.

Emannuel: Thank you for hosting Kiwix development tools and promoting free software.

Rich: Start by telling us what Kiwix is. How would someone use this?

Emmanuel: Kiwix allows to read Wikipedia offline. In addition, using the highly efficient ZIM file format (http://www.openzim.org), Kiwix can read any HTML content offline. In order to enjoy Wikipedia offline, you need to download Kiwix and a ZIM file of Wikipedia (from the Kiwix web-site or directly from the Kiwix internal library).

Then you can surf in Wikipedia as if you were online. Kiwix provides almost everything you will need:

Case and diacritics insensitive full text search engine

Bookmarks & Notes

ZIM based HTTP server

PDF/HTML export

Localized in more than 80 languages

Search suggestions

Tabs navigation

Integrated content manager/downloader

Rich: How did you come to start this project?

Emmanuel: Why lock up Wikipedia to Wikipedia.org? The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why we have launched the Kiwix project.

Rich: Can you give us some examples of your project being used in the real world?

Emmanuel: Our users are spread all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world’s citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.

Kiwix is used,for example, by the Wikimedia France Afripedia project, and also by

Wikimedia Kenya. And in India.

Spreading work is done by Wikimedia people and by third parties like NGOs. A lot of individuals also download Wikipedia offline once and then share it with their friends and relatives. We have had around 100.000 downloads in January.

Rich: Release more and more up-to-date content is our top priority. We continuously increase our ZIM file throughput by improving our ZIM generation toolchain. We will also soon start to release offline version of other Wikimedia projects.

To make Kiwix work on smartphones is our second priority. We hope to release a first version of kiwix-mobile for Android in April.

Regarding the far future, we will try to be one of the best open-source e-book readers. We think we have a cutting-edge file format with ZIM which is perfectly complementary with the actual EPUB standard. We will do our best to offer the best user experience with both in the future.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your community, what could they do? Are you looking for developers? Translators? Users? Testers?

Emmanuel: Actually, the most important work to do, can be done by everyone: this is promoting and sharing Wikipedia offline with Kiwix. We have remarked that most of the people, although they would really need it, think it is impossible to have the whole Wikipedia with pictures on a USB stick. That’s why we need people to setup projects and spread it.

But, we have also plenty of work otherwise, for example:

We would love to have a new javascript developer able to add the EPUB support using Monocle

We always need new translators for the user interface

We are working currently on a solution for plug computers called kiwix-plug; and there is a lot to do for people having GNU/Linux admin skills:

We need a C++ expert to help us improving tools to manipulate ZIM file, we need especially a solution to make ZIM incremental updates.

Of course need we testers, join us at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kiwix-testing

We need a bug master to manage all the tickets on the bug tracker

If you are interested, simply join us on Freenode IRC #kiwix channel.