[Wikireader] wikipedia-iphone on XO.

christopher fabian cfabian at tmo.blackberry.net
Fri May 2 21:43:13 EDT 2008


Could we use this at unicef for connecting classrooms project? It's all in modified mediawiki environment but some of the schools in uganda and ethiopia have such poor cnnctvty that they have paper folders where they have drawn exact copies of the wiki and are writing stories on paper by hand with the hope that they can, at some pt, share....
C
Sent from my Blackberry.  *PLEASE REPLY TO cfabian at unicef.org*

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org>

Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 20:49:34 
To:"Benj. Mako Hill" <mako at atdot.cc>
Cc:Erik Garrison <erik.garrison at gmail.com>, wikireader at lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: [Wikireader] wikipedia-iphone on XO.


Hi Mako,

   > We can write something to go through and deal with the XML file
   > pretty easily to build these kinds of subsets. I worked on code
   > that could have been easily been converted to do this with (new
   > OLPC employee) Erik Garrison a couple early years ago.

Cool.  Got a link to your code?  I've been looking at:

   http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MWDumper

which would let us import the .xml.bz2 into mysql, perform queries, and
output a .xml.bz2 of the result.  The queries could be of the form "has
more than 50 edits" or "gets more than 5000 pageviews a month" or "has
many incoming links".

Was your code a whitelist or a blacklist?  I'm primarily interested in
pruning articles that are likely to be uninteresting from the full dump
until it reaches an acceptable size, rather than starting from nothing
and including pages that meet criteria.  The whitelist approach would
be far more appropriate for the English wikipedia, but I think the
blacklist approach is more important for the (400M) Spanish one.

   > I've CCed Erik in case he is still at all interested. I'd be
   > interested in helping get Javascript rendering so we don't have to
   > do that in Ruby or Python.

(I don't see Erik on the CC list; maybe mailman removed him because he's
not subscribed, or maybe you forgot.)

   > Perhaps the iPhone guys will take it as a patch since it would
   > reduce their codebase and, in all likelihood, improve their
   > performance.

Actually, the response I got was that it sounds like a bad idea because
it would degrade performance -- JavaScript is slower than Python.
I suspect we don't care, though; the iPhone needs to have a snappy
interface, but XO users will be used to clicking on something and
waiting at least five seconds for it to render.

Mel Chua wrote this up into an awesome wiki page that we can point
potential volunteers at to get an idea of the problem:

   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wiki_server

- Chris.
--
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
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