# App/Import/Download Central

From XOWA: the free, open-source, offline wiki application

Download Central is a simple way to download wikis for XOWA

## Overview

As of v3.6.3, the Download Central page lists available wikis for download.

The advantages are as follows

- Simple: Find a wiki, click on it, and it will imported.
- Android and desktop: Listed wikis will work directly on Android as well as the desktop. These wikis are HTML dumps of XOWA pages.
- Images included: Listed wikis will also include image databases. Previously, users would need to download image databases separately from archive.org.
- Suspend and resume: Long tasks can be paused and resumed at a later point in time.

More wikis and functionality will be added to this page throughout 2016.

## Technical details

Download Central works in the following manner:

### Get list of wikis and files

- Loads a list of wikis from C:\xowa\bin\any\xowa\addon\bldr\central\bldr_central.data_db.xowa
- Loads a list of files for that wiki. For example, Simple Wikipedia will have 3 files
  - Xowa_simplewiki_2016-06_core.zip
  - Xowa_simplewiki_2016-06_file.zip
  - Xowa_simplewiki_2016-06_html.zip
- Generates a "task" for each group of files and lists them in the "Available" table.

### Download the files

Available tasks can be added to the Queue. When the Queue is run, Download Central will do the following:

- Download the file from archive.org
  - source url: The location of the file will be of a form like https://archive.org/download/Xowa_simplewiki_latest/
  - target path: The file will be downloaded to C:\xowa\wiki\simple.wikipedia.org\tmp\bldr\
- Verify the download with an MD5
- Unzip the download
- Verify the unzip with an MD5
- Move the file to the wiki directory. For example, simple.wikipedia.org-core.xowa will be moved to C:\xowa\wiki\simple.wikipedia.org\simple.wikipedia.org-core.xowa
- Register the file in the user's list of wikis (for "core" wiki file only)
- Repeat again with each file until done.

## Manual setup

Some users may not want to use Download Central. For example, users may have an alternate download manager which will be faster[1]

In these cases, manual setup is still possible in the following way:

- Click on the Info button for your download. For example, Simple Wikipedia Articles will take you to home/wiki/Special:XowaDownloadCentralInfo?task_id=1
- Copy and paste the listed URLs to your download manager.
- Unzip the files to the `wiki folder` listed on the Info page. For example, Simple Wikipedia files will go to C:\xowa\wiki\simple.wikipedia.org\
- For the desktop, just restart XOWA. XOWA will automatically pick up the new wiki
- For Android, copy the files to your SD Card. See Android Setup for a list of paths.

## Existing monthly update users of the English Wikipedia v2b images

This section only applies to users who have been manually downloading the monthly updates for English Wikipedia.

### No need to redownload the images in Download Central

The Download Central image databases are the same as the existing ones on archive.org. They only differ in the following ways:

- They are broken up into 1 file per zip instead of 3 or 4 files per zip
- They have an md5 file.

If you are up-to-date with your monthly updates, all you need to do is download the update for 2016-06. For example, let's say you downloaded the initial v2b batch:

- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-1.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-2.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-3.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-4.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-5.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-6.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-7.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_ns-000_part-8.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-06-02_file_v2b_wiki_file_ns-100.7z

You then downloaded all the monthly updates until now:

- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-08-05_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-09-01_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-10-06_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-12-06_file_v1.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2015-12-06_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2016-01-13_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2016-02-03_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2016-03-05_file_v2b.7z
- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2016-05-01_file_v2b.7z

All you have to download is the 2016-06 update:

- https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/Xowa_enwiki_2016-06-01_file_update.7z

At this point you will have exactly the same files as those in Download Central

### Download Central should be used for 2016-07 and future monthly updates

For next month (and future months), you should download the monthly update through Download Central. There will be a new task called "English Wikipedia - Image Update (2016-07)". You will just need to download this item, and you'll be up-to-date.

Of course, you will still be able to download them manually from archive.org. But as shown by the section above, this can be quite laborious.

## Notes

1. ^ Most download managers will have various tricks to speed up downloads. For example, they can open up multiple connections to a server and download the file in pieces. In contrast, XOWA only opens one connection and downloads. For more technical info, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21981690/why-do-download-managers-work-faster-than-the-default-browser-downloaders

### XOWA

- Main page
- Screenshots
- Video
- Download XOWA
- Download wikis

### Getting started

- Requirements
- Installation
- Simple Wikipedia
- English Wikipedia
- Other Wikipedias

### Android

- Setup
- Video

### Help

- About
- Contents
- Media
- Feedback

### Blog

- Current

### Links

- Wikimedia dumps
- XOWA @ archive.org
- English Wikipedia

### Donate

- archive.org
- Wikipedia