![]() The big learning for us has been that users search for easily actionable content rather than super powerful technologies. Wikimed has been a huge success, and showed us the way forward. Medicine or Travel, but soon also History, Geography, or Movies). These package Kiwix with a topic-specific content (e.g. That’s why we spent the last two years developing dedicated apps for Android. Most of our audience at Kiwix does not own a computer at all, and probably never will our priority therefore is to have a great mobile-friendly portfolio. I see it as a real issue, in particular for collaborative and participatory movements like Wikimedia. They also tend to treat users as consumers and encourage that mindset. On the other hand, most ecosystems are closed or proprietary, making software development pretty expensive. It has also allowed for new kinds of softwares and features. In general, I have mixed feelings about the smartphone/tablet ecosystem: On the one hand, it has done a lot to make computers and internet access more affordable to people. How has this changed the landscape and the way you view of offline access? How do you see these devices impacting the future of educational resources? Smartphones have transformed the way people can access the internet, and recently you started building packaged apps for Wikimed. For the past 10 years, and now more than ever, they have joined and done what needed to be done so that free knowledge is available to all. I think in particular about these people who travel, often in really precarious conditions, from school to school to install Wikipedia offline.Īnother really dominant feeling I have is my gratefulness to the volunteers who make the project so lively. I don’t know if I have a “best surprise ever” to tell… but I’m often impressed by the ingenuity and the resilience of our users. What’s been the biggest surprise for you over the years? Our next Big Dream, therefore, is to consolidate our solutions and be more efficient in bringing them to people who really need it. But there still are too many folks out there who don’t know about the technology or can’t access it. Ten years ago, the dream was to create a technology to bring Wikipedia to people without Internet access. Our budget, while still ridiculously low, has also increased and allows us to pay for services that are sorely needed to grow in scale. We now have a small and very motivated team of volunteers with a huge array of skills. On the Kiwix side, the technology has changed a lot and the project has become a lot stronger. That’s not something we’d expected, and it forces us to constantly rethink offline access. At the same time, Internet censorship has increased. Around us, a lot more people now have broadband access, but 4 billion remain unconnected. What can you do now that wasn’t possible when you started Kiwix?Įngelhart: A lot has changed, indeed. You can also read the other interviews in this series, including a chat with Jeremy Schwartz of World Possible.Īnne Gomez: A lot has changed in a decade. Anne and Emmanuel chatted about how video and smart phones are changing the offline landscape-and where Kiwix plans to go from here. In addition to Wikimedia content, Kiwix now contains TED talks, the Stack Exchange websites, all of Project Gutenberg, and many YouTube educational channels. ![]() zim files, as has other free content, such as Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikivoyage.” ![]() Since Kiwix was released in 2007, dozens of languages of Wikipedia have been made available as. zim file that can be read by the special Kiwix browser. Īs we noted in a 2014 profile of Kiwix, the software “ uses all of Wikipedia’s content through the Parsoid wiki parser to package articles into an open source. Still, it’s perhaps best known for its distribution of entire copies of Wikipedia in areas of low bandwidth, like Cuba. In the eleven years since being invented, a number of organizations have utilized it, including World Possible and Internet in a Box. In her first conversation for the Wikimedia Blog, Anne chats with Emmanuel Engelhart (aka “Kelson”), a developer who works on Kiwix, an open source software which allows users to download web content for offline reading. Over the coming months, Anne will be interviewing people who work to remove access barriers for people across the world. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to the Internet can access free and open knowledge. Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online.
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