Notices by Kiwix (kiwix@mastodon.social)

This includes Switzerland, where Kiwix is based. We therefore regret to inform our American friends that our hotspots (prepper, medical, etc.) won't be available anymore for purchase in their country.

We put together a helpful map of places where Swisspost does not ship:

You may have heard that most postal services around the world have suspended parcels shipping to the great nation of the USA following new rules that came into force on 29 September and that nobody seems to be able to understand. 👇

@Infoseepage @Life_is Yes and no, more explanations behind this user unfriendly situation at https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-android.

Good news: the offline version of Wikipedia is back!
Bad news: so many people are currently trying to download it that our mirrors got crowded out and can't download the update!

So what's next ? 👇

We have disabled http (direct) downloads for the day to get some breathing space.
No worries, that's only for today.

But this means that downloads through the Kiwix app won't work. You will need to use a torrent 🌊 client instead

Here is the torrent file: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim.torrent

After a long delay, we finally release an update of the top 1M articles from #Wikipedia in English https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&q=1m&category=wikipedia

@Infoseepage that's our next step.

@Infoseepage No malice, no, just a big, massive amount of data to parse during crawl.

A link to known bugs is at the beginning of the thread.

1/3 of the failures remain scraper bugs to be fixed - some are fairly trivial and are being hot-fixed in 1.15.1, some are more subtle and will be fixed in milestone 1.16.

The problem is that we don't when/where failures will occur.

As a reminder it takes anywhere between 6 to 20 days of crawl and compute to generate a zim file with 7M entries. It this happens at the beginning of the crawl, it sucks. If it happens at the end of the crawl, this sucks big time.

Roughly 2/3 of the failed recipes are related to errors preventing the retrieval of a given article; we've chosen to replace these errors on a case-by-case basis, only after analysis; we continue to discover new errors (InvariantException, etc.).

Some of these are actually on the Wikimedia end of things, but we are talking and they have people working on them as well.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/affects-kiwix-and-openzim/

About 99% of Wikipedia zim files are now back on a monthly update schedule. The remaining 1% (24 wikis) are impacted by a variety of edge cases, listed here.

https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues/1432

It is not always the big wikis that fail, but chances of encountering such edge cases are mechanically higher when there are many articles to crawl.

Seeing how long it has been (and how many have been asking/waiting for an update) we are also seriously considering accepting a number of missing entries : 100? 1000?

Out of 7 million entries it is peanuts, but if for some reason some of the missing entries (which we can not predict) are on this list

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report

it is a problem. We'll probably go ahead anyway, but we'll cross that bridge when we're there.

Current timeframe: The English Wikipedia bug is part of the 1.15.1 milestone and is therefore priority: it should restart before the end of this week.

By the end of June, we will also have fixed most of the other impactful bugs listed in 1.16 and will restart the remaining recipes.

"Swasticar" made its way to #Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swasticar

Want to help to spread the latest ZIM files using #bittorrent? It never has been easier to create a super-seeder of (part of) our full catalog of offline archives! Everything is automated and you'll be kept in sync with the Kiwix library! You just need a GNU/#Linux, a bit of storage & bandwidth. Checkout https://github.com/kiwix/seeder #FOSS #EDTECH

@Infoseepage Monthly updates is also our rule for Wikipedia.

Thank you for your offer. It's not all in our hands but I'm optimist. Once it will work, you can do a "Thank you" donation at https://kiwix.org/en/get-involved/#donate.

Regarding, older archives, we don't really have the storage necessary to provide more than two versions of a title. Here is the oldest version we provide of Wikipedia in English https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2023-11.zim

@Infoseepage Soon hopefully, lots on work is invested on this.

Looks like Deepseek is the new, cheaper way to get wrong answers

"Sometimes it is worthwhile to meet your heroes"

Richard Stallman will be coming to Lausanne on 17 January at 6pm to discuss The Cost of Freedom.

https://kiwix.org/en/richard-stallman-a-lausanne-le-17-janvier-2025/