Is there any approved way of getting a local copy of the wiki?

[summerdown]

Anyone know if there's an approved way to get a local copy of the traveller wiki. I don't want to hammer the site and I'd like to only do what's acceptable.

One idea might be if the wiki could update the kiwix project, which can be found here: https://kiwix.org/

The idea of the site is that wikis and other knowledge centres can put a copy up in their format. Then people can download them and use the kiwix program to browse the wiki locally.

I used it to download a local copy of wikipedia, and it works really well.

So, I'm just wondering:

a) If there's an approved way of downloading the traveller wiki, or
b) If a copy could be added to kiwix to allow easy download?

 

[tjoneslo]

You can download the whole of the wiki from the export page. You probably want the "Library" category which has all of the articles in the library. You then need to use one of the kiwix tools to convert the downloaded XML file into a .zim file which can be used by kiwix viewers.

Export pages - Traveller

wiki.travellerrpg.com

I will say the kiwix project site is the most content free site I've had the misfortune to come across in a long time.

 

[MichaelSTee]

You then need to use one of the kiwix tools to convert the downloaded XML file into a .zim file which can be used by kiwix viewers.

I will say the kiwix project site is the most content free site I've had the misfortune to come across in a long time.

Yes, I think you're right about that last statement. I'm kinda interested in doing something like this myself, for an ATU. I can't find anything that tells me how to convert an XML to a ZIM. Also, no info on OpenZim.org either. At least that I can find.

 

[MichaelSTee]

Playing around with this some more, because it's become an itch which must be scratched: I went to the Export page linked to by @tjoneslo , and clicked on the Add button to add the Library category to the Add Files Manually box. When I clicked on Export, the xml file only contained the Library entry.
When I clicked on Add and it added a whole lot of entries (5000 in fact), then I pressed Export, I got an XML with 5000 page entries. NOT all the wiki pages, I'm certain. So how do you get ALL the entries?
(Also, still haven't figured out how to convert the XML to a ZIM. Dangit. If I have to learn PHP I'll drop the project - not enough free time for that!)

 

[tjoneslo]

It really does look like most of the ZIM file creator programs are based upon bots scanning the site. Most of them will fail because the Traveller wiki is larger than the "free" versions of the site trawlers will allow. And the Traveller wiki copyright may cause them headaches.

The core issue is the mediawiki formatting to HTML conversion is very specific to mediawiki, and the tooling for that is flaky and hard to manage at best. I'm familiar with the problems as I wrote a script to pull random articles from the wiki to post to discord.

I'm going to leave this here as a guide as to what was required in 2019 to do the conversion, and assume the world has moved on in the 6 years since, but not very far.

Possible to create ZIM file of whole Wiki? (my own, based on mediawiki)

I want to generate an offline ZIM version of our own Wiki (that runs on Mediawiki).The Collection extension is a breeze to install, but only works for selecting single pages, which in a next step c...

stackoverflow.com

If you can come up with a better set of directions, I'll happily take a look.