Content strategy

Bit of History

The openZIM has been created almost 15 years ago. His primary goal was to specify a file based storage solution to efficiently store and access Wikipedia (Mediawiki) offline ; and then implement an official reader/writer software library came right after. The ZIM open spefication and the libzim are still at the core of the project. A few years later the ZIM tools have been launched to easily inspect and manipulate ZIM files on the command line.

But, over the following years, most of the project activity has grown around scrapers and we actively maintain more than 15 of them now. After a while, it has appeared that we should really start to mutualize code to avoid too much of duplicate code and rationalize maintenant. Therefore, a few libzim bindings and scraper libraries were created.

These very few years, facing an increasing demand, we have develop the project to industrialise the ZIM creation process. This effort led to the launch of the Zimfarm or our custom CMS. We have taken care as well of the proper further development of Wikipedia selection infrastructure WP1.

Context

Today, the openZIM projects looks pretty different from what is was at start : it actually delivers far more than expected first. It has moved from a pure software project to what more and more looks like a publishing organisation.

While these efforts were led on openZIM, the Kiwix project continued his own journey. Even if this is a never ending story to maintain Kiwix software stack, this is a mature portfolio and there is no disruptive plan. But one interesting learning has been made is that people are not interested in Kiwix itself, but in the content which are made available offline. This is pretty clear if we consider the success of or Android custom apps.