Mission

The great Goals

Our target is to make Wiki content offline available, especially contents from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia.

The general goals we want to achieve:

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

Our way to achieve these Goals

The ZIM File Format

• compresses 900.000 articles (full german Wikipedia beginning 2009) to only 1.3 GB
• features a fulltext search index
• features native category and image handling similar to MediaWiki
• is fully documented on this website - ZIM File Format
• if you need help implementing it just contact our mailinglist
• we are working on a ZIM File Archive to provide a central place to publish ZIM files including mirroring etc.

The openZIM implementation

• is all free and open source (GPL)
• is based on ZIMlib, a library written in C++
• provides a ZIMwriter to create ZIM files from a HTML dump (eg. a prepared database)
• provides a ZIMreader as an example how to read ZIM files; ZIMreader acts as a local webserver
• there are some more tools such as the ZIMdumper to have a look into ZIM files or check them

What openZIM is NOT

• we are not going to create Wikipedia dumps or publishing own content in ZIM files
• we are a team of volunteers and enthusiasts, not a business
• we might not be able to provide you with a implementation in your favourite programming language
• maybe we can not add a feature especially for you (if it doesn't fit in the openZIM goals)