Mission

Our mission is to make web content available offline, with a primary focus on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

We focus on extracting and encoding data from Mediawiki for offline use. We would like to also add support for other wiki engines and content management systems so that this can become a ubiquitous file format for offline usages.

We even believe the file format could be flexible enough to support any kind of web data.

What openZIM is

• The ZIM file format is the most efficient and works on all platforms, embedded devices and desktop computers.
• The ZIM file format is used by all kind of publishers, even outside the Wikimedia community.
• Both ZIM reader applications and ZIM files are freely interchangeable.
• Everyone can implement software for ZIM files because it is in a open and documented standard.
• There is at least one free implementation which is open source, the zimlib.
• The zimlib can be used easily in other software to make it easy to use the file format without having to implement it.

What openZIM is not

• A publisher or distributor of content saved into the ZIM format. While we will make every effort to help those wanting to this we simply do not have the resources to do it ourselves. We do keep an index of known ZIM adopters at our archive page.
• This project was started by the enthusiasm of volunteers and is mainly driven by them and not business interests.
• Due to the small size of the core development team we are not be able to offer up a specific implementation of the ZIM format in your chosen programming language. We hope that by publishing the specifications and working together more implementations can be written by the adopters of the format.