State of the Kiwi

2020, General

Here is a broad update of where we stand in terms of technology for the project. First, the chart below summarizes broadly our tech stack and may or may not help you navigate what follows: Overall Kiwix is healthier than ever, with about 30% more code contributors,...

How to report a bug

2020, Android, Apple, Desktop, General, Hotspot, Kiwix JS

Tickets -be it bug reports or feature requests- are the basics of any software improvement. The lack of tickets or poorly written ones seriously impair a healthy software development. Like building a house on weak foundations, this should be avoided. Why open a...

Three young coders to keep an eye on

2020, GSoC

Google Summer of Code 2020 is over, and boy was this a great year. Three very different projects, and tons of improvements. Here’s a little summary, both to express our thanks and, for future potential employers trying to sneak-google candidates, a good summary...

Wikipedia to Whatsapp, and circumvent data bundles.

2020, General

Fact: a lot of smartphone users do not have internet access, which makes these phones a lot less smart than they should be. The reason? Mostly cost: data is expensive. It is not uncommon for telcos to offer “bundles” whereby people can buy unlimited access...

60,000 public domain books can fit on a flashdrive

2020, General

There are still parts of the world where access to the global internet is limited. Rural parts of world from Alaska to Africa to Asia have bandwidth to that is unevenly distributed. Governments regularly cut off website and apps access to their residents, with...

A short history of farming

General

Here is a very nice email we received some time ago: re: Donating some compute power to the zim farm Hi, I have some spare compute power for at least a month, if that’s useful. If so, here’s a virtual machine that can be used for the Kiwix project:...

Baby it’s cold outside

2020, General

A month ago on 8 July, 2020, 186 reels of open source code were stored in Github’s Code Vault, inside the Arctic World Archive at Longyearbyen, on Svalbard island. And Kiwix, or rather its source code, was part of the trip. Gihub’s idea is to preserve...

Quechua Wikipedia for Quechua villagers

2019, Hotspot

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual report for the last year is out! There is a section about Kiwix, and how it can help share knowledge in areas with no internet access. We have many stories to share: the one they decided to focus on takes place in Ecuador....

Kiwix-android 3.3.2/3/4 release notes

2020, Android, Release notes

ZOOM! So many updates that we can’t keep track of them. So these release notes will do for Kiwix-Android 3.3.2/3 and 4. New: You can now control text zoom with a pinch! Better flow for hosting content with your phone or tablet as a hotspot; We rewrote the...

We’re on Edge (extension release notes)

2020, Kiwix JS, Release notes

So besides being the worst pun of the year for a blog title, there is an actual release of a Kiwix-JS extension for Edge, the new Microsoft browser with a cool logo. It also comes with the update for Kiwix-JS 2.8, that also works on Firefox and Chrome. New:...