Mediawiki DumpHTML extension improvement

The Mediawiki DumpHTML extension improvement is an effort which needs to be granted as soon a possible to provide an efficient and a simple to use (and deploy) way for people wanting to bring offline their Mediawiki base wiki.

Context

The ZIM format was choosen by the top actors around Mediawiki to provide an offline usable version of their content. The ZIM format was designed to deal efficiently with hugh amount of data. This format is complementary to the EPUB which is more though for small content.

But, we still suffer from a lack of tools to build such files and only a few people have the mandatory know-how and tools to do it:

• Kiwix, using a hacked version of Mediawiki DumpHTML extension, which currently is the only one project generating (and more or less able) big ZIM files from WMF projects. You may already yet download on Kiwix Web site such ZIM files.
• Mediawiki Collection extension developed by Pediapress which is on Wikipedia user friendly but really complicated too install on a separate instance, slow and not able at all to deal with huge amount of data. In addition, the technical approach is they are not able at all to tune the content efficiently for offline usages.

Our year long experience showed us that the Mediawiki DumpHTML extension (at least the approach) is the best solution to export the Mediawiki dynamic generated HTML pages in a set of static HTML/Media files. This extension is better and has more potential to get a good set of HTML pages from a Mediawiki (in comparison with a Web site mirroring tool for example or an extern rendering solution).

Unfortunately, they are few pain points:

• Not maintained, bugs are not fixed, new features are not implemented
• Only available for Mediawiki system admin
• Does not generate ZIM files

Challenges

Consequently, almost nobody use it right now to generate ZIM files, this is too complicated. This, although a lot of people want to do that and contact the Kiwix dev. Team to help them to make a ZIM of their own content. But not only external projects would benefit from such a development, we would also gain a lot in efficiency and this would be the first mandatory step to prepare automatically ZIM files.

Workpackages

Workpackage1: Revamping and fixing bugs

The worth point is that the DumpHTML extension is not correctly maintained and with the time, many issues were discovered. Currently, the extension is not really usable without fixing/tweaking the Mediawiki code.

The purpose of this work package is to fix the most critical bugs to achieve that everyone having a Mediawiki would be able to simply get a HTML dumps of his content and consequently being able to easily generate a ZIM file afterwards

After the revamping, the result should be perfect in HTML similar to what dumpHTML.pl does.

Delivarables:

• Revamping dumpHTML and fixing bugs (80-120 hours)

Costs:

• ~ 4000 euros

Workpackage2: phpzim creation an integration in DumpHTML extension

phpzim would be a new php module allowing to create/write and read ZIM file directly in PHP. This would be a binding of the zimlib, like pyzim in Python. With this library done, we will be able to create ZIM file directly from the DumpHTML.

To be able to get a ZIM file, the user will have to call dumpHTML.php and specify that he wants a ZIM file output (not a HTML dump) also some other meta informations like title, creator, etc.

So the user will need a system access where the Mediawiki instance runs and also to install phpzim (should be packaged).

Deliverables:

• phpzim (40 hours)
• updated dumpHTML (20 hours)

Costs:

• ~ 2500 euros

Workpackage3: Integrating Collection and DumpHTML extensions and new features

By integrating the DumpHTML and the Collection extension we want to give to everyone the capacity to easily create small ZIMs from the Wikipedia user interface with following advantages:

• exactly the same rendering as online
• no external dependency to install for the Mediawiki admin
• rendering done by MediaWiki (as fast as online browsing)

In addition we want to implement a few additional features (see the list of deliverables).

Deliverables:

• Book and DumpHTML integration (30 hours)
• DumpHTML parallel processing (15 hours)
• Build selection based on list of titles (20 hours)
• Create an offline skin for mobiles to make dumps for mobiles (15 hours)
• Make offline skin to avoid pictures (5 hours)

Costs:

• ~ 3500 euros

Realisation

The realisation of the whole project would take 4 months and would be supervised by Kelson (creator and lead developer of Kiwix) and a member of WMFR. Payment would be done after validation by both supervisers of each workpackage.

If you want to know more:

• Kiwix presentation document (in French): http://www.kiwix.org/images/6/6f/Kiwix_presentation_fr.pdf
• Kiwix official Web site:http://www.kiwix.org