[Server-devel] Schools Wikipedia

[David Leeming]

Don't know if anyone else has tried this, but in the Schools-Wikipedia
(www.schools-wikipedia.org) is a selection of 5,000 articles with all adult
content removed based on UK curriculum but pretty useful for many English
speaking countries works nicely as an offline resource on the XS. This is
useful in our Pacific islands region where even if there is Internet, it is
not sufficient or too expensive to allow a whole class let alone a whole
school browse online regularly. 

 

It downloads as a 3GB zipped file which expands as HTML based files and
folders. As the Browse activity seems to only accept index.html as default,
I made a copy of the index.htm "home page" so that you have both in the root
director, i.e. index.htm and index.html - this means the home page opens by
default and the home page links on the wiki content continue to work also.

 

I copied it into a suitable area on the disk, in my case
/library/Schools-Wikipedia and then made that folder public with an alias
"Schools-Wikipedia". This is done using a .conf file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/

 

To get it up on an XO which is connected to the server, just dial in
http://schoolserver/Schools-Wikipedia (i.e. the alias used in the conf file)

 

Seems to work beautifully! Some great content, great Maths section for
instance. 

 

The thing I liked about this was the ease of access, the content collection
was available from the home page of the SW website, and with easy
instructions. The only problem was getting the 3GB download! That remains a
significant challenge in the small islands countries (in contrast, on a trip
to Australia recently I managed to download half of it over a few drinks
using the wireless provided free by a pub.... )

 

Of course this is a "one-way" read only wiki - one needs to be able to
adapt, reuse, re-age, mix and translate content too! For that we can use
Moodle which has a wiki and I am told one can install MediaWiki on the XS
also.

 

David Leeming

Solomon Islands 

 

 

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