News

On April 10th, 2010, 22 persons, of which 19 members entitled to vote, gathered for the General Assembly of Wikimedia CH at the University of Neuchâtel. The Assembly began at 2.30 pm and was conducted by President Mourad Ben Abdallah. Initially, he briefly resumed the Annual Report of the Board and pointed especially to the fact that the association should sooner or later become more professional in order to provide better communication. Board and members should equally become more active to lobby in behalf of the association on a regional level.

The Treasurer, Bagawathram Maheswaran, then presented the Financial Report featuring a balance sheet and the calculation for 2009. The income rose from 54'000 to 150'000 CHF compared to last year due to a highly successful fundraising campaign in November and December. Both the amount for the Wikimedia Foundation and the funds for Swiss projects increased. The Auditors, Jürg Studer and Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, checked the calculation and recommended to discharge the Board. All the reports were unanimously approved.

Before the elections, the Assembly needed to decide over the size of the future Board. The medium option with 6 Board members (incl. President) was chosen. Seven members presented their candidature for the Board, two current Board members didn't run for another mandate. The result of the ballot: Elected are

• Mourad Ben Abdallah (President, reelection),
• Frédéric Schütz (reelection),
• Bagawathram Maheswaran (reelection),
• Charles Andrès,
• Patrick Kenel,
• Ilario Valdelli (reelection).

Mourad was reconfirmed as President. As no one showed interest in being Auditor, the Assembly decided to hire a company to check the association's finances.

Afterwards, the Assembly went closely into the upcoming TAO Project which has already been presented one year ago and whose realization is bound to start in September 2010. This international project that intends to promote the integration of elderly people into Internet communities has a duration of three years as was mentioned by project leader Beat Estermann of the Bern University of Applied Sciences. Its ambition is to create a win-win-win situation for the target group (seniors), Internet communities and society as a whole. Social scientists as well as technicians are involved with the project. The overall budget amounts to 3 million euros.

Wolf Ludwig explained that the TAO Project needed active participation on the part of communities. The benefit which Wikimedia CH could expect to gain from this project consists in the attribution of more Wikimedia contributors and a further outreach of the chapter in different parts of the country. The association will engage in community activities (together with local partners) and the sectors Public Relations/Community Relations.

The Assembly had to give a mandate and to declare the willingness to engage financially and organizationally in a extraordinary way. Both issues were debated in the course of the Assembly. Finally, the creation of a core group, the amount for the first year (between 35'000 and 50'000 CHF for a payed project lead and other expenditures) as well as a budget frame for the following years (around 25% of the annual budget) were approved. One conclusion out of the discussion was that the engagement wouldn't be a great risk as the mandate could be withdrawn at the next GA should the project fail early. Already next year, some conclusions should be drawn.

The first measures to the implementation of the project are: a reunion of the core group (led by Wolf Ludwig) and plans for a fundraising to finance the project. The General Assembly was officially closed at 6.05 pm.

Updated DVD based on free software

Wikimedia CH has released a new edition of the German Wikipedia DVD on LinuxTag 2009 from 24th to 27th of June, in collaboration with openZIM. The DVD contains more than 900,000 German Wikipedia articles and a full text search index for phrasal search. The openZIM project develops a file format called "ZIM" to store hypertexts like Wikipedia, or other websites, with search indizes and images in the most efficient way. The data is highly compressed; the Wikipedia articles only take up 1.4 GB on the DVD.

Using the free software on the DVD ZIM files can be read and also be created. A library with all necessary features enables software developers and publishers to integrate the ZIM format in their own products. As the software is still in testing, the swiss Wikimedia chapter has, at first, produced 500 Wikipedia DVDs which will be given away for free at LinuxTag in Berlin. Manuel Schneider, project lead of openZIM and member of Wikimedia CH, says: "Even though we are still testing this first release is very important for us, we are always happy about help. Reporting bugs and problems with our software is part of that."

Since April 2009 there has been a collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of Wikipedia based in San Fransisco/USA. Software developers of the Wikimedia Foundation are working on integrating the ZIM format into the regular exporting process, which will provide ZIM files of all Wikimedia projects in all languages in the future. Furthermore, it is planned to build a similar feature into MediaWiki, the wiki software behind Wikipedia and countless other wikis. A new edition of the Wikipedia DVD, in Spanish, is planned for the Wikimania conference from August 26th to 28th of 2009 in Buenos Aires.

Further information about the openZIM project

The openZIM project has existed since February 2009. The ancestor was the TntReader project, which followed a call by Directmedia to develop an open source reader application for the Zeno file format. Directmedia defined this format to publish Wikipedia on a DVD. The last DVD of 2007/2008, published by Directmedia, contained the proprietary reader for Windows for the first time, with the TntReader, as open source software which ran on Linux and Mac OS X. The openZIM project expanded and published the Zeno file format as the ZIM (Zeno IMproved) file format. All software and documentation which was made by openZIM is released under GPL.

The openZIM is present at LinuxTag from June 24th to 27th in Berlin on booth 113a (hall 7.2a). More information at: http://openzim.org/ or http://www.linuxtag.de/.

Wikimedia CH encourages the development of a free standard for Wikipedia offline content as well as all neccessary tools to create and read such data.

The free file format ZIM is based on Zeno files which were developed in 2006 by the berlin publisher Directmedia. It is enables the usage of libraries like Wikipedia without internet access. The german Wikipedia DVD 2006/2007 was the first release based on this file format and was shipped with the ZenoReader - a webserver application - which served the articles to the local webbrowser.

Tommi Mäkitalo of the Tntnet project developed the first complete replacement for the proprietary ZenoReader. The Tntreader runs on all POSIX compatible operating systems. In cooperation with Directmedia file format and reader were further developed, resulting in the german Wikipedia DVD 2007/2008 which was bundled with Mäkitalo's free software.

The availability of free software and an efficient file format sparked the interest in being able to create individual Zeno files to make more libraries offline available. Wikimedia CH supports these efforts by providing the project team around Tommi Mäkitalo with a server and a budget for developer meetings.

The first developers meeting took place this weekend around February 21st 2009. The project team meet for the first time to know each other personally, created a roadmap, discussed technical concepts and some improvements of the format. As it is now an entirely free project of the open source community it was renamed to openZIM: The open implementation of the improved Zeno format (ZIM).

It is planned to have all the tools ready to create a ZIM file containing the german Wikipedia by the LinuxTag 2009 where the project will be presented.

Website: http://openzim.org