Phone is broken? Camera is broken? Your car as well? Then you can either, you know, buy a new one of each or simply try and fix them. And the best resource for that is probably iFixit – a global community of people helping each other repair things.
Years ago, iFixit used to provide DVDs of every single iFixit guide in PDF form. These DVDs were quite popular but hard to maintain, especially with the ever increasing number of guides that were being published to the site.
Eventually the DVDs were not updated anymore and the offline initiative was put on pause.
Many people in the world still do not have Internet access: it can be because of data cost, missing infrastructure, or censorship. In fact, almost four billion (one of every two humans) still do not have reliable access to the Internet. Of course not all of them need access to iFixit or even know that they might need it. But, let’s face it, if they can not afford connectivity, then the odds of needing such a resource are higher.
What does it all have to do with Kiwix?
Kiwix provides packages of as many online resources as possible to offline communities, and keeps these packages updated on a regular basis.
There are two big advantages to Kiwix. First, the standalone reader is based on web technologies, ready to archive any web site. Second, the archive format is quite efficient in terms of compression. Kiwix makes the internet portable.
With this in mind, how could we not want to bring iFixit on it?
After weeks of coding, we are now happy to announce that offline archives of iFixit are available for everyone to download in each of the 12 languages currently supported by the website. Each package is about 2.5GB in size and contains more than 44 thousand guides, including 456 thousand images, listed among nearly 19 thousand categories.
These packages will be updated every quarter to include new and updated guides, as the community continues to grow and fix things. These packages will also be regularly uploaded on archive.org to ensure long term availability.
The scraper project is open source and will be hosted under the kiwix organization on Github. It is a community project: do not hesitate to give a hand if you have some expertise in Python programming or simply report a bug if you find one.
We also definitely need your help to spread the word, and feedback is always appreciated.
Kiwix is free, does not collect data nor runs any ads (we’re a non-profit), so if you would like us to support more volunteers to bring more cool websites to people without internet access, support us!