Kiwix

Kiwix
Kiwix on an Android-powered tablet
Developer(s) Emmanuel Engelhart, Renaud Gaudin
Stable release(s)
Android 2.2 / February 28, 2017 (2017-02-28)[1]
iOS 1.8.1 / April 17, 2017 (2017-04-17)[2]
Preview release(s)
Desktop 0.9 / November 1, 2014 (2014-11-01)[1]
UWP 0.9.9.7 / September 14, 2018 (2018-09-14)[3]
Repository
Edit this at Wikidata
Operating system Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Windows 10 Mobile
Size
  • Desktop: 30.6 MB – 106 MB[1]
  • Android: 6.2 MB
  • iOS: 48.3 MB
  • UWP: 4.2 MB
Available in 100 languages[1]
License GPLv3
Website www.kiwix.org
Kiwix on MacOS
Kiwix on Linux

Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007.[4] It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation as well as public domain texts from the Project Gutenberg. Available in more than 100 languages, Kiwix has been included in several high-profile projects, from smuggling operations in North Korea[5] and encyclopedic access in Cuba[6] to Google Impact Challenge's recipient Bibliothèques Sans Frontières.[7]

History

Founder Emmanuel Engelhart sees Wikipedia as a common good, saying “The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why I have launched the Kiwix project.”[4]

After becoming a Wikipedia editor in 2004, Emmanuel Engelhart became interested in developing offline versions of Wikipedia. A project to make a Wikipedia CD, initiated in 2003, was a trigger for the project.[4]

In 2012 Kiwix won a grant from Wikimedia France to build kiwix-plug, which was deployed in universities in eleven countries in the Afripedia Project,[8][9] and in February 2013 Kiwix won SourceForge's Project of the Month award,[10] - and an Open Source Award in 2015.[11]

The incompatibility list includes iPhone OS 1, iPhone OS 2, iPhone OS 3, iOS 4, iOS 5, iOS 6, iOS 7, iOS 8 and is expected to continue throughout the product line on a chronological basis.[12]

Description

The software is designed as an offline reader for web content. It is used on computers without an internet connection, computers with a slow or expensive connection, and to avoid censorship. It can also be used while travelling (e.g. on a plane or train).

Downloading new content files on an early version of Kiwix

Users first download Kiwix, then download content for offline viewing with Kiwix (see picture). Compression saves disk space and bandwidth. All of English-language Wikipedia, with pictures, fits on a USB stick (54 GB as of May 2016, or 16 GB with no pictures).[10][13]

All content files are compressed in ZIM format, which makes them smaller, but leaves them easy to index, search, and selectively decompress.

The ZIM files are then opened with Kiwix, which looks and behaves like a web browser. Kiwix offers full text search, tabbed navigation and the option to export articles to PDF and HTML.[1]

There is an HTTP server version called kiwix-serve; this allows a computer to host Kiwix content, and make it available to other computers on a network.[14] The other computers see an ordinary website. kiwix-plug is a version for plug computers[10] which is often used to provide a wifi server.[15]

Kiwix uses the deprecated Mozilla framework localised on Translatewiki.net,[16] but plans to replace it.[17]

Available content

Reading Wikipedia through Kiwix on a boat in the South Pacific[18]

A list of content available on Kiwix is available for download, including language-specific sublists.[19] Content can be loaded through Kiwix itself. Since 2014, most Wikipedia versions are available for download in various different languages.[13] For English Wikipedia, a full version containing pictures as well as alternative version containing text only can be downloaded from the archive. This allows users to save disk space and bandwidth while downloading. The servers are updated every two to ten months, depending on the size of the file. For English Wikipedia, the update frequency is thus substantially lower than the bzip2 database downloads by the Wikimedia Foundation, which are updated twice a month.[20]

Besides Wikipedia, content from the Wikimedia foundation such as Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks and Wikiversity are available for offline viewing in various different languages.[21]

In November 2014 a ZIM version of all open texts forming part of Project Gutenberg was made available.[22][23]

Besides public domain content, works licensed under a Creative Commons license are available for download. For example, offline versions of the Ubuntu wiki containing user documentation for the Ubuntu operating system,[24] ZIM editions of TED conference talks[25] and videos from Crash Course are available in the Kiwix archive as ZIM file formats.[26]

Deployments

Kiwix can be installed on a desktop computer as a stand-alone program, installed on a tablet or smartphone, or can create its own WLAN environment from a Raspberry plug.

Locations of 13 universities where Kiwix was deployed as part of the Afripedia Project

As a software development project, Kiwix itself is not directly involved in deployment projects. However, third party organisations do use the software as a component of their own projects. Examples include:

  • Universities and libraries that can't afford broadband Internet access.[27]
    • The Afripedia Project set up kiwix servers in French-speaking universities (some of them with no Internet access) in 11 African countries.[28]
  • Schools[29] in developing countries, where access to the internet is difficult or too expensive.[10]
    • Kiwix is installed on the computers used for the One Laptop per Child project.[4]
    • Kiwix has been installed on Raspberry Pis for use in schools with no electricity in Tanzania[30] by the Tanzania Development Trust.
    • Kiwix was installed on tablets in schools in Mali in the MALebooks project.[31]
    • Kiwix is being used by school and university teachers, as well as students, in Senegal.[32]
    • Kiwix is deployed in Benin during teacher training seminars run by Zedaga,[33] a Swiss NGO specialized in education.
    • The Fondation Orange has used kiwix-serve in its own technological knowledge product they have deployed in Africa.[34]
    • A special version for the organisation SOS Children's Villages was developed, initially for developing countries, but it is also used in the developed world.
  • At sea and in other remote areas.[10][35]
    • Aboard ship in Antarctic waters.[36]
    • Kiwix is used by the Senegalese Navy in their patrol ships[37]
    • Kiwix is included in Navigatrix, a Linux distribution for people on boats[38][39]
  • On a train or plane.[10][40]
  • In European and US prison education programs.[10]

Package managers and app stores

Wikipedia medical app on smartphone

Kiwix was formerly available in the native package managers of some Linux distributions. However, Kiwix is currently not available in most package databases, due to XULRunner, a program on which Kiwix depends, being deprecated by Mozilla and removed from the package databases.[41] Kiwix is available in the Sugar and ArchLinux Linux distributions. It is also available on Android.

Kiwix is available in the Microsoft Store[42], on GooglePlay[43] and iTunes.[44] Since 2015, a series of "customized apps" have also been released, of which medical Wikipedia and PhET simulations are the two largest.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Kiwix". SourceForge. Retrieved 22 March 2012.
  2. ↑ Kiwix iTunes page
  3. ↑ "Kiwix JS". Windows Store. Microsoft.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Joe Sutherland: Emmanuel Engelhart, Inventor of Kiwix: the Offline Wikipedia Browser. In: Wikimedia Blog. 12. September 2014. Accessed on 26 November 2014.
  5. ↑ "The plot to free North Korea with smuggled episodes of "Friends"". Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  6. ↑ "¿Cómo utilizar Kiwix como servidor local?". Retrieved 3 July 2017.
  7. ↑ "Les Lauréats du Google Impact Challenge". Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  8. ↑ Citazine article on Afripedia (in French)
  9. ↑ Traoré, Kardiatou. "Afripédia : un projet de promotion de Wikipédia en Afrique". www.afrik.com. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Kiwix Aims to spread Wikipedia's Reach". Slashdot.org. 2013-02-04. Archived from the original on 2013-03-02. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  11. ↑ "OSS Awards küren Schweizer Open-Source-Projekte". Netzwoche. Retrieved 2015-12-08.
  12. ↑ https://ibb.co/ib5hOc
  13. 1 2 "Content in all languages - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
  14. ↑ Kiwix-serve
  15. ↑ "Kiwix-plug - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  16. ↑ "Translating:Kiwix - translatewiki.net". translatewiki.net. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  17. ↑ "Linux Packaging project - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  18. ↑ Sailing the South Pacific
  19. ↑ "Content in all languages - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2017-06-09.
  20. ↑ "English-language Wikipedia". Wikipedia. Retrieved 2017-11-17.
  21. ↑ Zim archive for Kiwix
  22. ↑ Emmanuel Engelhart: 50.000 public domain books available to everybody, everywhere, offline. In: Wikisource-l-Mailinglist. 19. November 2014. Accessed on 26 November 2014.
  23. ↑ "Words and what not: #Wikimedia & Project #Gutenberg - the sum of all knowledge". ultimategerardm.blogspot.ch. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  24. ↑ Ubuntuusers Hilfsmittel
  25. ↑ Kiwix archive for TED
  26. ↑ Kiwix archive for additional content
  27. ↑ "Main Page - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  28. ↑ "Afripedia project increasing off-line access to Wikipedia in Africa". Wikimedia blog. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  29. ↑ "(fr) ASRI Education may 2013" (in French). Asri-education.org. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  30. ↑ "Raspberry Pi in Masekelo: Bringing Wikipedia to a school without electricity". Wikimedia blog. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  31. ↑ "Children in Mali can now read Wikipedia offline, thanks to MALebooks e-readers". Wikimedia blog. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  32. ↑ "West African schools will test Kiwix, the offline Wikipedia reader". Wikimedia outreach education newsletter. 2016-08-31. Retrieved 2017-06-11.
  33. ↑ "Kiwix is mentioned on the thank-you page". Zedaga (in French). Retrieved 2017-06-11.
  34. ↑ Fondation Orange: le programme "écoles numériques" Archived 2015-04-05 at the Wayback Machine.
  35. ↑ "Sailing the South Pacific with a copy of Wikipedia on board: The Goodall Family". Wikimedia blog. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  36. ↑ "Hans Oleander: Using offline Wikipedia to guide tours at the bottom of the Earth". Wikimedia blog. Retrieved 2017-06-11.
  37. ↑ "Kiwix'le Wikipedia'ya ulaşmak hala mümkün". gazetekarinca.com (in Turc). 2017-05-05. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  38. ↑ "Navigatrix.net - A Voyager's Companion". navigatrix.net. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  39. ↑ "Navigatrix – the first Linux distribution for cruisers". Your Cruising Editor. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  40. ↑ Amarilli, Antoine. "A local copy of Wikipedia with Kiwix - a3nm's blog". a3nm.net. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  41. ↑ "Debian - Kiwix". www.kiwix.org. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  42. ↑ "Get Kiwix JS - Microsoft Store". Microsoft Store Online. Retrieved 2018-02-12.
  43. ↑ "Kiwix, Wikipedia offline - Android Apps on Google Play". play.google.com. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  44. ↑ "Kiwix on the App Store". App Store. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
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