ZIM Autobuild

The ZIM Autobuild is a software and infrastrucure project which has for purpose to build more and more efficiently ZIM files of the Wikimedia projects.

Introduction

Kiwix is well established by now, there are more and more users/downloads and we know that users are really satisfied. It's accepted as the reference software to read ZIM files and does more or less everything what people expect from such a software. In comparison, the offered content is still too small. I manually prepare full Wikipedia ZIM files with pictures in about 25 languages. This is the right moment, to fix that problem.

This project has for purpose to provide a solution with following properties:

• Fully automatic
• Web configurable/manageable
• able to build full or partial (only a selection of articles) ZIM files of WMF projects
• able to tweak the content by removing/modifying categories, templates, articles
• able to compute full ZIM files with pictures for at least the 50 largest Wikipedia (except English)
• able to compute full ZIM files without pictures for most of the WMF projects
• Able to provide Sugar .xo packages including content + Kiwix (developed in the B&W scope)

Workpages

Here are the three parts of the project:

• Reimbursement of the server (~6500 CHF)>
• Payment of a professional hosting in Zurich (~4500 CHF *over two years*) (see /housing)
• One month of code development (Kelson) will do on a volunteer base

Financing

This project is granted by Wikimedia CH (Switzerland)

Timeline

• End of June: Server in Datacenter

We had two offers and I decided to take the one of Weblink for 225CHF/month. This was not the cheapest one, but the datacenter is really near to my house, something essential for me: I wanted to be able to quickly and easily make hardware maintenance. Server is migrated and works. Kelson 14:45, 20 August 2012 (CEST)

• End of August: first automatic version running
• End of September: end of the project

See also

• The grant request