Can someone take a site dump, and somehow read it offline? Yes!
Steps to getting offline access to Appropedia
This approach uses the Zipedia Add-On for Firefox. Concerns:
- Zipedia is no longer found in Firefox's addon database. What is the reason?
- It is claimed to work with Firefox 1.5-3.0. It's not clear if it works with later versions.
Assumptions
- You are on a windows machine - the general steps are identical for Linux (zipedia works just fine on Linux) but you will need different software to create the .bz2 file
Steps
- Download and Install the latest version of Firefox.
- Add the Zipedia Add-On to Firefox.
- Download the Appropedia current dump (here).
- Download and install 7zip
- uncompress .gz file
- Right click on file
- Choose "7zip"
- Choose "Extract here"
- compress .xml file to .bz2
- Right Click on "currentdump.xml"
- Choose "7zip"
- Choose "add to archive"
- Change Archive Format to "BZip2"
- Click "OK"
- Import to Zipedia
- Reload Firefox if you haven't already
- Click "Tools"
- Click "Add-ons"
- Select Zipedia
- Click "Options"
- Click "Generate Zipedia"
- Select "Next"
- The input path should be your newly created .bz2 file
- The output path should be an empty folder such as "appropeda" in your "my documents" folder
- type "wikipedia://wiki/Appropedia:CategoryTree" into your address bar
If you have any questions, hit up my talk page David.reber 04:51, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Alternatives
WikiBrowse is an OLPC project for browsing a slice of Wikipedia offline. It has not been tried yet with Appropedia.
Further Reading
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikislice might help.
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse_English.
- http://lee.org/blog/2008/08/17/how-to-create-an-html-dump-of-mediawiki/
- Seth from OLPC says (via Twitter): "SJ and CJB have spent quite a lot of time compressing large sections of #wikipedia into a stand-alone static library... come to think of it cscott has done a lot of work in static caching of our wiki in interesting ways, he would be useful too."
- http://www.thewikireader.com/update This $99 device can host several off-line "pedias" but no pictures. I wonder how useful appropedia would be without pictures. Would it be part of what wikireader owners would want?