Notices by Kiwix (kiwix@mastodon.social)

Latest full #Wikipedia #offline #ZIM #archive has just been made public!
https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia

Like always, #BitTorrent rocks!

After months of hard work, our new Web site is finally online! https://kiwix.org. Share your impressions!

@Infoseepage Sorry to put it bluntly, but you have to accept it and better would be to be a bit thankful. It's not like we would have a deal, you invoices and Kiwix an SLA!

@Infoseepage Already ongoing, see https://farm.openzim.org/recipes/wikipedia_en_all_maxi. All our scraping tasks run fully transparently on our Zimfarm!

Each of us, and any organisation, who cares about freedom, should start to take measures to decouple from the USA. #Wikimedia first!

Roman works on one of them big boats, and is a Kiwix user. He's also shared a pic to prove it!

If you are a Kiwix user from anywhere in the world, do send us pics of your surroundings - we really love these.

Your periodic reminder that if you speak any of these languages (or others) you could spend a couple of minutes translating a few strings (usually 3-8 words at a time)

https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:MessageGroupStats?group=kiwix&messages=&suppresscomplete=1&x=D#sortable:3=desc

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.