Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team
 | This page in a nutshell: We are publishing selections of Wikipedia articles for offline use in Kiwix releases, in print, or for distribution on flash drives/memory cards. Most of the work is organized off wiki. |
This is the Version 1.0 Editorial Team page.
General background
In late 2003, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales had proposed making an offline release version of Wikipedia. This group was formed in late 2004 to meet this challenge. Our work involves identifying and organizing articles, and improving and maintaining a core set. Our work does not hinder the existing wiki process for creating and editing articles, but rather it supports that work by providing additional organization. We aim to produce collections that can be used in places where the internet coverage is expensive or non-existent. Our early collections were distributed via DVD; now these are shared via download, then distributed on hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. Originally, only a fixed selection was available, but there is now much flexibility in how selections can be made. This project is now mainly one point in a network of groups who collect and distribute open educational resources from the Internet in an offline form.
See these more detailed related articles:
- Guide to Wikipedia Release Version tools
- Wikipedia 1.0 FAQs
- Wikipedia 1.0 Release Version Criteria
- Broad overview of Wikimedia's Offline Project
How you can help
You are encouraged to join us and help out with one of the projects, or to discuss Wikipedia 1.0 on the talk page. A significant part of our work centers around maintaining the assessment scheme, which is now used on more than seven million articles by over 1000 active WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia. It is also being used on other language projects. Generally work on this team is sporadic – periods of hectic activity followed by long periods of waiting! Often work is long and tedious – checking through a list of 22,000 instances of profanities one by one, organizing 10,000 keywords taken from category names, or dealing with technical bugs when the assessment bot fails for no apparent reason. However, it is all worth it in the end.
Our strategy has been intensely debated, but the group has reached a consensus. We elected not to follow the German model. Instead we chose to start with a core of quality articles on key subjects and expand from there. We have produced three test versions: Version 0.5, Version 0.7, and Version 0.8 with the goal of releasing better collections of articles in due course. The next general release is generically referred to as "Release Version" while our first "official" comprehensive release will be called Version 1.0. These collections are then made available for offline use using a reader such as Kiwix, which was chosen as Sourceforge project of the month. The project was on hiatus for several years because of the loss of our main developer. However, as of February 2016, a new group of developers has begun work on upgrading the code and the process, in order to start producing new collections again, especially collections for schools.
Current needs
Although we have much of the requisite system automated, there are still some outstanding tasks:
- Preparation of a reliable index. If you can write code and you're interested in how to map category trees into a useful index (not as easy as it sounds!) please contact Walkerma.
- Reviewing manual nominations. Whenever there is a new release being planned, we need volunteers to review a few articles and process them.
- Propose useful "guide" pages to be added, such as lists and disambiguation pages.
- Check for vandalism in the selected version-IDs of the articles.
- Develop nice pages for navigation through the content, such as subject portals.
- Test the reader software, and find and report bugs.
- Help with distribution, especially in remote areas without Internet access.
Please let us know on the Talk page if you can help with any of these.
Status
At present, the main activities are:
- The assessment scheme, which is used by WikiProjects for organizing their content, using talk page tags and the WP1.0 bot. The bot was updated with completely new Perl code in 2020–2021, and it is currently maintained by User:Audiodude. Technical problems with the bot should be reported here. Related to this work is the WP1.0 server (previously called "Release Version Tools) which provides ways for WikiProjects to analyze article lists and data relating to their work.
- Collaborations to produce offline collections are done in collaboration with various people from Kiwix and Internet-in-a-Box. Please contact Walkerma if you wish to help.
To select articles, we are mainly using a bot-assisted selection process based on assessment by individual WikiProjects, where articles are selected automatically based on quality and importance project rankings.
RevID selection
Based on discussions (at the 2017 Potsdam hackathon and since), we plan to reactivate RevID selection. Previously code based on WikiTrust was used in Version 0.8, and this appeared to produce a largely vandalism-free collection of articles. This worked by scoring each RevID based on the edits remaining in it, and choosing the most "trustworthy" recent RevID based on the WikiTrust algorithm.
Wikipedia 1.0 projects
Active projects
If you would like to start a new project, please discuss it on the talk page first before adding it here.
| Wikipedia 1.0 Projects | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Summary of overall strategy | Coordinator | Description of activities | ||||
| School selection | Put together selections of 1–10 GB sizes for use in high schools and elementary schools | User:Walkerma and others | Uses new code that starts with a seed and works out, guided by the WP 1 selection ranking to guide it | ||||
| Work via WikiProjects (WVWP) | Use "networking" to mobilise our existing subject specialists | User:Walkerma | Organise and facilitate compilation of article lists from the WikiProjects and seek to identify important topics within each WikiProject's area of expertise. Locate important topics that are currently not being managed by projects. In conjunction with WP:COUNCIL, the project serves as a link with the editing community, and may later help locate expert reviewers. | ||||
Past releases
| Past Wikipedia 1.0 Projects | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Summary of overall strategy | Month of release | Description of activities | Website | Next release | ||
| Version 0.5 | A test release prior to release of Version 1.0 above. | April 2007 | A test release designed to pave the way for Version 1.0. Used manual nominations and approval based on importance and quality. Approval was by only one person, from the review team. | Okawix | Version 0.7 | ||
| Version 0.7 | A test release of automated article selections, prior to release of Version 1.0 above. | Early 2010 | A test release designed to pave the way for Version 1.0. Used SelectionBot to make an article selection based on importance and quality. Vandalism prevention used a script, with manual checks, which delayed the release significantly. [1] | Kiwix reader, ZIM download | Version 0.8 | ||
| Version 0.8 | A test release of automated article selections, prior to release of Version 1.0 above. | March 2011 | A test release designed to pave the way for Version 1.0. Version 0.8 used bot-assisted article selection, with manual adjustments based on feedback from WikiProjects. Used as a test of the WikiTrust revisionID selection code - this worked well. | Wikipedia:Version 0.8/downloads. | Version 0.9 | ||
| 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection (previously called "Test Version") | Work with release version done off site that was coordinated by BozMo | April 2006 | 2000 articles with content filtered/selected for use by children (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection). | No longer available - see 2008/9 release below | 2007 Wikipedia CD Selection (below) | ||
| 2007 Wikipedia CD Selection | Work with release version done off site that was coordinated by BozMo | May 2007 | 4655 articles with content filtered/selected for use by children (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection). | No longer available - see 2008/9 release below | 2008/9 Wikipedia CD Selection (below) | ||
| 2008/9 Wikipedia CD Selection | Work with release version done off site that was coordinated by BozMo | October 2008 | 5502 articles with content filtered/selected for use by children (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection). | http://schools-wikipedia.org | Not yet known | ||
Inactive projects
| Inactive Wikipedia 1.0 Projects | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Summary of overall strategy | Coordinator | Description of activities | ||||
| Authoritative Editions | Gives experts in each field the tools to review suitable articles in their area of expertise and give their okay to particular revisions. | Sj, Jeff Keller, Gnp |
| ||||
| Featured Articles First | reviewing older or problem FAs to ensure that quality is maintained, ready for inclusion of these articles in Wikipedia 1.0. | (Now a standard part of the FA system) | |||||
| Geography project | to produce a descriptive gazetteer of the world for publication. | This could include an atlas, continents, countries and major cities. This would serve as a test bed for publishing Wikipedia 1.0, but could also be a valuable stand-alone product. | |||||
| Three Level Editing | Users participate in a three part editing process to assure that pages are up to quality standards. | The first level is just a general check, the second level is a factual check, and the third level is a last "just in case" check. This process would assure that articles would be up to standards without putting too much responsibility on one user. | |||||
| Biographies | Improve and assess biographical articles | Focus especially on the 200 Core Biographies, in conjunction with Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography.
. | |||||
| Dynamic Pocket Cyclopedia | Lists most important FAs, FLs, and GAs. | An evolving list of no more than half of Wikipedia's most important featured articles, featured lists, and designated good articles. | |||||
| WikiSort | Integrate the sifting process into the Wiki. | Aims to use data from the planned user rating scheme to provide rankings of articles, such that important quality articles can be automatically identified for inclusion in Wikipedia 1.0. This project has been rendered obsolete by WikiProject-based assessments (see above). | |||||
| Article assessment | To assess articles | This project has been rendered obsolete by WikiProject-based assessments (see above). | |||||
Publishing steps
The process of generating an offline version of a sub-selection of Wikipedia article is multistage. It needs many dedicated and singled-purposed operations. The following chart show how the WP1 project envisioned things in 2010.
Even if this chart is still, to a large extend, valid; we practice and envision things slightly differently nowadays. One of the most important paradigm change we had to make is to remove as much as possible human based manual activity because the amount of work is simply too high to be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. We tend now to automate as much as possible the whole process. As a consequence the project is now predominantly focused on technology.
Technical approach
Support Wikiproject assessment effort
The first software created to support the WP1 project has been the User:WP_1.0_bot. First written in Perl by User:CBM and then slighly modified and maintained by a few other volunteers. In 2020 the bot has been totally rewritten in Python following modern development standards (API, automated tests, etc.) by User:Audiodude. The code base is available en developed on Github.
The WP1bot had and still have three traditional purposes:
- gather assessments (via categories introduced on main namespace articles talk pages),
- upload on Wikipedia logs & stats
- provide key information & tools to Wikiproject on a dedicated Web service. The data can also be accessed through an API at api.wp1.openzim.org
Select article titles
...
Select article revision
...
Scrape selected articles for offline usage
...
Orchestrate periodic and multiple scraping
...
Publish and distribute offline snapshots
...
Statistics
The WP 1.0 bot tracks assessment data (article quality and importance data for individual WikiProjects) assigned via Talk page banners. If you would like to add a new WikiProject to the bot's list, please read the instructions at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot.
The global summary table below is computed by taking the highest quality and importance rating for each assessed article in the main namespace.
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Related pages
General
- Jimbo's proposal, Chicago Meetup - Jimbo's Oct 2004 ideas on how to get to 1.0.
- Wikipedia:Pushing to 1.0 Early discussion page for brainstorming ideas, before this team was created.
- meta:Wikipedia 1.0
- meta:Static content group
Assessment and validation
- Wikipedia:Article assessment
- meta:Article validation and Wikipedia:Pushing to validation - argue the benefit of article validation and possible implementations
- Wikipedia:Flagged revisions (similar to the older "stable versions")
- Wikipedia:Footnotes
- Wikipedia:Peer review
- Wikipedia:Request for comment
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check
Wikipedia books
- Wikipedia:Books & meta:WikiReader - Wikipedia books are collections of articles from Wikipedia on a certain topic, in the form of PDFs published for download and intended to be printed, and also to be sold in printed form.
- The Book Tool, and Wiki to print, a collaboration between the Foundation and OSI/PediaPress.
Article selections
- Wikipedia:Vital articles
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles - Filling the gaps.
- Wikipedia:Good articles
- Featured Articles
- Wikipedia:Stable versions
See also
- List of online encyclopedias - compare Wikipedia with other projects