Projects
The Kiwix volunteers program offers motivated and talented people ways to work for Kiwix during a limited time. Contributors can speak English, French, or German. Technical volunteers should know JavaScript, CSS, or other web languages, or C++.
Tasks
(re)-Introduce ZIM support in MediaWiki Book creator/OCG
MediaWiki is the wiki engine behind Wikipedia, all Wikimedia projects and thousands other Web sites. It's a cutting edge free software providing highly featured web sites that anybody can edit. MediaWiki hosted content can be made available for offline usage through the Collection extension (written in PHP). The Collection extension allows to easily create collection/selection of articles: so called books ; here is how it works on the English Wikipedia. Once created, books can be exported in PDF format. The PDF exporting backend itself is not provided by the Collection extension, it's done with a JavaScript based solution called OCG. OCG is a NodeJS daemon able to transform a book definition in a PDF and it should be able to do the same in the ZIM format. The ZIM format allows to store web pages (with images, videos, etc...) in one extremely compressed file. These pages are then available to read on most computers with a reader like Kiwix. A stub of solution has already been written and the MWOffline is already functional. This task is mostly about merging them.
phpzim (assigned)
Promotional video (assigned)
Look here for more details.
Testing platform
We need a solution to test automatically Kiwix. We have currently nothing... so we start from scratch!
Wikipublish
Create a publication platform, a Web site online similar to iTunes which would provide the list of available contents to download in ZIM, EPUB, .... also offer to see the book before downloading it.
- Want to know more...
- Add support of EPUB in Kiwix
OSM
Make a proof of concept of a ZIM file providing a map using OSM data and a tool like openLayer.
Improve P2P support
- Fix Mirrorbrain to integrate torrent links in mirrorbrain
- Fix Mirrorbrain to support fallback torrent trackers in .torrent files
- Add a way to exchange library and content on a local network (for example, using "bonjour" & BitTorrent DHT)
Linux Packaging project (assigned)
Ambassador Program
Create an ambassador program. Ambassadors would be special people especially aware about Kiwix and able to help others:
- Spread contents
- Make conferences
- Make advertisement
- Local representative
To do that, we should develop a set of tools:
- Advertisement Package
- Ambassador program definition
- Map base on Ushahidi to locate them
Starter Kit (Assigned)
Perhaps a nice kit would help. You know, like for organizing Linux installation parties[1] or Mozilla's event kits[2] etc., that encourages people, and provides step-by-step guidance and advice, to go and install Kiwix with a relevant offline Wikipedia file in their local no-Internet (or restricted/expensive Internet) school, college, community center, etc.
Would anyone be interested in working on that? WMF can contribute funding for some materials -- a Kiwix quick-start guide or cheatsheet, stickers, T-shirts. [1] http://ladypine.org/installfest.html, http://www.wikihow.com/Arrange-Linux-Install-Party [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/Teach/WebmakingResources
Video
It would be great to have a video (screencast) presenting the software with its most important features.
Here is a proposition:
- Presentation slide of the video with slide and authors
- Presentation of the context (Online Wikipedia put offline of a DVD)
- Presentation of the principle of Kiwix and ZIM
- Starting Kiwix
- Open file
- Indexing file
- surfing
- searching
- special features: fullscreen, switch language, font bigger/smaller, random page, etc.
- Finish (present the ZIM availables and how to download them)