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Offline Projects/Reports/August 2025

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2024-2025 Annual Report of the Wikimedians for Offline Wikis UserGroup

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Objectives of the UserGroup

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There have been many efforts to distribute offline snapshots to places with little connectivity, via schoolservers, wikireaders, and pocket-sized servers that run on batteries.

In 2017, a retreat for offline-wiki developers, users, and deployers was organized by Martin Walker at Potsdam University. In addition, Kiwix has organized hackathons for their toolchain and related use cases for many years. This user group is a shared community for people developing any of these offline related initiatives!

This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018 to

+ Consolidate and support offline snapshots of wiki knowledge, and deployments of them in schools, clinics, and rural communities.
+ Update and maintain the offline projects portal on Meta.
+ Advocate for better distribution of and awareness of offline wikis, in all parts of the world where internet access is restricted, expensive, or unavailable: including schools, clinics, prisons, refugee camps, disaster areas.

Activities in FY 2024-2025

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Kiwix

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About 12-15 million users worldwide that we are aware of (meaning it is a lower-bound estimate as a lot more are offline): China and the US remain our top markets, but Kiwix users can be found in every single country or territory on this planet, from Antarctica to the Vatican. Being able to bring a mature and reliable technology has opened the door for a growing ecosystem of new use cases: offgrid groups in the US, but also deployment via satellite (Iran) or on local university networks (Cameroon).

Tech

  • MWoffliner is back and running for literally 99.9% of Wikimedia ZIM files... with the exception of enwp's "maxi" (all text and images). Should be fixed in the early next cycle (2025-26);
  • New major release for Kiwix for Desktop, which accounts for about a third of our deployments (mostly schools / computer labs);
  • Fixed a major sideloading issue for Kiwix for Android, which makes it easier for people to share ZIM files without having to download them.
  • Major outage in December 2024 because of a provider's let-down. Need to work on resiliency.

Content

  • As indicated, most Wikimedia content is back to its regular monthly update schedule;
  • Fixed a major issue with Chinese (content was displayed in mostly traditional Chinese while our readership is mainland) to display content in simplified characters.

Varia

  • There is growing demand for the Offline Hotspots - Raspberry Pi-based devices that can access and broadcast offline content. Lots of new (commercial) entrants, all of them using Kiwix one way or the other;
  • Thanks to its registered non-profit status in Switzerland, Kiwix works as fiscal sponsor for a growing range of Wikimedia User Groups.

Wikimedia-ZA deploys Offline Hotspots

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Our chapter entered a partnership with the National Youth Development Agency to deploy about 30 R. Pi hotspots in schools in South Africa. Besides Wikipedias in all eleven official languages, we included a diverse digital library (not only from the Kiwix repository, but also the National Education Department's portal, e.g. textbooks) in each hotspot, as well as a WikiFundi instance with ample storage for user-generated content. Because the devices were deployed to the schools by NYDA staff, we offered a brief online training for those staff.

WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique

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Poster at Wikimania 2025

The WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique is a training and writing program designed for schools in French (initially) speaking Africa, using WikiFundi software. It is targeted at the education community towards using wikimedia tools to acquire and share knowledge to develop skills of the youth and of their teachers. Most of those schools are offline, having only access to Kiwix content. The articles produced are posted on Vikidia, and the pictures on Wikimedia Commons. The initiative successfully took place in 2024-2025 along similar lines as previous years : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique with the addition of three English speaking countries this year!

In 2024-25, the programme is implemented in 13 countries (Botswana, Burkina-Faso, Cameroun, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinée Conakry, Libéria, Madagascar, Mali, Maroc, RDC, Sénégal, Sierra Leone and Tunisie)). The winning establishments will be announced in September 2025 All together, 174 articles were submitted and published on Vikidia. 736 photos and videos have been submitted by the children to Commons.

The contest was also featured on a poster during Wikimania in Kenya.

To read more

Contest is run by Wiki in Africa, in partnership with several usergroups (Cameroun, Tunisia, Maroc, Botswana, Guinea, RdC...) and Fondation Orange

Wiki Project Med

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We continue to directly assemble and ship MDWiki:Internet-in-a-Box as distribution via the Wikipedia store has sold out. We have brought on two Canadian based contractors who support this process. We ship units for 63 USD with customization options available for 83 USD (this includes shipping globally).

Since we started direct shipping Dec 22nd 2024 we have had orders for 550 units. Most orders have been from the USA, with other countries including Canada, Qatar, Belgium, Spain, United Kingdom, Poland, Montenegro, Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, France, Denmark, and China.

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We voted in the BOT Election short listing process: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2025/Shortlisting_process

Description of the process followed by: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/YKMWW6OHOJLK4RRORAEAXMSPME477NSK/

Communication

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Membership in 2023-2025

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Administrative

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Affiliation

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This group was formed at the WMCON in 2018, by implementers in different countries who found one another and realized that we were not coordinating efforts as well as we might -- and did not know the current status of many important offline projects, as these were not gathered in a single place. The UG was subsequently approved Wikimedians for Offline Wikis

Contacts

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Group contacts as of mid 2025

See also

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