Kiwix Annual Report 2019

Offline on the radar

and eyes on the mission

In 2019, more people started coming to terms with the fact that the world was hitting a plateau in relation to connectivity. The number of users with poor or no internet access barely changed and remained at about 4 billion (or 50% of the world’s population).

For Kiwix this meant increased recognition in the form of awards and speaking opportunities – most notably WISE in Qatar, and hundrED in Helsinki, where Kiwix was recognized as one of the Top Innovations in EdTech for 2020.

But even though we are grateful for the opportunities and recogniton, we remain focused on our mission: to bring online content to people without internet access.

To this end, we have continued to work on what people want: better, simpler and more reliable products. We have improved all of our platforms (Android, desktop and hotspot) and released a new zimfarm that finally allows us to update all of our content on an industrial scale.

2019 was, indeed, a good year.

What’s new

Wikipedia selections

Generating ZIM files off Wikipedia has always presented us with two issues:

  • Size, of course, as archives can be pretty big (thus making direct download a challenge).
  • Language. How do you make a landing page that is meaningful and useful for users whose language you can’t speak or write?

The first issue we had started solving in 2017, with the first release of Wikimed: for students in Health Sciences, it made sense to have a medical encyclopaedia focused on medical content. But nothing, in fact, prevented us from releasing similar selections dedicated to History, Geography… or Basketball.

We then realised that in order to make the first interaction with these new selections more interesting it would be wise to look at… Wikidata. The sister project neatly compiles all of Wikipedia’s entries and all the relevant facts about them – starting with their spelling in each language and which image(s) can be used to illustrate those entries.

The next step was to simply compile selections and take the 100 most frequently viewed articles and use the Wikidata-selected images to build a tiled landing page. Each selection now offers a sleek, compelling landing page, with a list of articles whose title is in the correct language. No more clumsy Google translations, no more guessing what to share.

New selections released this year included Geography, History, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Football, Basketball, and Cricket in more than a dozen languages. The largest Wikipedias also saw the release of a “Top” selection with the 50,000 most read articles.

ZIMfarm

Updating ZIM files used to be a real labour of love: each scraper had to be manually started, and the resulting file transferred to the Kiwix library. This was already hard to manage when we had several hundred zim files in our catalogue, but with several thousands it simply had become a daunting -and tedious- task.

Things changed for the better in 2019 with the advent of the ZIMfarm. To be honest, it resembles more a ZIMfactory than a farm: almost a dozen servers located around the world and running 24/7, all year round to automatically update every single one of the more than 4,000 files we provide every day to millions of users.

Recipes (scripts used to copy a given type of website structure, e.g. mediawiki pr Youtube) are easy to clone, making it much easier to aggregate new content: this is the logical next step that will allow us to grow our catalogue ever more quickly and offer more choice to everyone, in their own language.

The ZIMfarm now manages almost 1,200 recipes for as many websites (some of them come in various flavours, e.g.. with or without images), producing nearly 5,000 updates every month or so.

And because we are committed to openness, all farm operations are viewable here:https://farm.openzim.org/

« How does it impact children who have never experienced the internet? They love this kind of learning, it rebuilds cultural pride to see “Ladakh” within Wikipedia. »
Cynthia Hunt, Health Ladakh

More 2019 milestones

Kiwix-Android 3.x

A much-needed update to our code base, with an almost complete upgrade to Kotlin which resulted in performance improvement and a slightly improved UI. Android phones can also now work as hotspots, meaning that users can share content with their friends via Kiwix.

Get it here.

 

Kiwix-desktop 2.x (beta)

2019 might have signalled the end of the tunnel for this project. A series of beta versions were released for both Linux and Windows throughout the year so as to allow users to replace the ageing and deprecated Kiwix for desktop 0.9 (there’s never been a version 1.0). Newer features will be rolled out with the final version in 2020.

Download it here (Windows) or here (Linux).

Kiwix for iOS and macOS

Entirely and single-handedly managed by an awesome volunteer based in the US. The new releases fixed a bunch of bugs, as well as minor UX improvements.

Get the macOS or iOS apps.

Hotspot cardshop

The first step towards building a Kiwix hotspot that could scale and reach more users consisted in sharing an easy to use installer. People with zero knowledge of command lines should be able to assemble the content they want and create a hotspot for themselves, their families, or entire schools. Get access here.

Stockholm hackathon

This year’s Hackathon was held in Stockholm and took place next to Wikimania, the Wikimedia Movement’s annual gathering. Participants came from Switzerland, France, India, Mali, the UK and the US and met for 9 days of non-stop coding.

The full summary of goals and achievements can be found here.

Kiwix-JS for Windows

Another volunteer-led project, Kiwix-JS initially started as a browser extension so that people could directly open and read ZIM files from Firefox or Chrome. The technology was adapted as a standalone app for Windows. Kiwix-JS can actually run on older 32-bit computers that are still largely used in many countries. 

 

Numbers

Users, users everywhere!

 

134

language variants for the Kiwix interface

80%

80% of our downloads come from the Global South

4’000

We have more than 4,000 different ZIM files free to download and distribute

 

What’s next

Looking out to deliver these in 2020 and beyond.

ZIM-it!

Supported by the Mozilla Foundation, ZIMit will allow us to convert almost any website and make it go offline. Released planned for Q4/2020.

More custom apps

One size does not always fit all. How about your very own, very portable, very offline dictionary?

 

Hotspot-to-go

We’re planning an easy sign-up interface to the cardshop, as well as hotspot images to go. Stay tuned.

Special thanks to:

Metoki
Brno University of Technology
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