Thursday, November 20, 2014

#Wikimedia & Project #Gutenberg - the sum of all knowledge

"To share in the sum of all knowledge" is the vision of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Swiss chapter does understand this really well. It has adopted Kiwix, an off line reader for content that is published in the ZIM format.

Project Gutenberg is a well established organisation dedicated to the digitisation of books. Its catalogue of 50.000 public domain books is now available to everybody, everywhere and offline as well.

Thanks to a hackathon, all books are now available in the ZIM format, you can search in all the books at the same time. The best news is that not only has this work been done for a first time, it is build in such a way that it can be easily repeated.

Future deployments may include all the books of Wikisource, books from other sources and even copyrighted works as well. The point of Kiwix is that it is an enabler, it allows for the dissemination of knowledge and to achieve THAT is what our aim is.

Congratulations to the Swiss Wikimedia chapter for providing the sustained support of this valuable project.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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