What is the problem?
Its become increasingly clear that the Wikimedia foundation will need to generate and host packages of downloadable content for offline consumption (similar to Kiwix). This decision comes from our plans to fill the community wishlist item for Android to support zim files (the original wish suggests organized around Wiki Projects), and the aligned research findings of the New Readers program.
Currently, its not clear how these content packs are being generated, and we've developed some proposed criteria and an initial list of collections (see parent task). However, in the medium-long term we believe the curation and management of these collections should be open to communities or admins, or as in the original proposal built on top of existing curation workflows (like Wiki Projects or Wikipedia 1.0).
How does success of this task look like? How do we know when we are done?
I think there are two outcomes we're looking for, one short term around awareness, and one longer around interest/best path for community ownership of this "library".
- In the short run, we want to be transparent and make clear what content is included in v1 and why (see parent ticket), and that this is a short term solution, but that we're very interested in turning this function over to a more "open" form of community control.
- In the long run, we need help determining if there is volunteer interest in such as system, and if so what do the communities think the best mechnisms for this are? Is it just basing them on WikiProjects? Is it re-abling book creator to "generate and share" these? It it having a Special page where each project's lists of offline "packs" are defined/editable in wikitext?
Our goal is not to "foist" additional work on admins/volunteers, while wanting to make this a form of curation that adheres as closely as possible to our norms and values.
Is there any goal, program, project, team related with this request? Please provide links and use the corresponding Phabricator tags when available.
This is being driven by a combined effort among the New Readers program and the Android Readers app team.
This grew out of two main sources:
- A general push on reading lists and offline lists described here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Reading_Lists
- New Readers offline focus area: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Offline
- Community wishlist item for ZIM support in the official app: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/Reading#CW2016-R077
Phab tags:
Android-app-feature-Compilations-v1
#Reading-Epics-Offline
What is your expected timeline from start to end? Is there a hard deadline?
The beta version of this feature is on track to hit beta users in the next month or less. Public release, and potentially related Communications outreach/marketing is targeted for late August,
so having the basic awareness message happen by then is ideal.
The longer term conversation/consult is not on any specific timeframe.