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 [edit]

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.

Usage [edit]

  • Open the Main Menu and choose Tools -> Download Central
  • or, go directly to home/wiki/Special:XowaDownloadCentral

Technical details [edit]

Download Central works in the following manner:

Get list of wikis and files [edit]

  • 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 [edit]

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
  • 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 [edit]

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 [edit]

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 [edit]

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:

You then downloaded all the monthly updates until now:

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

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 [edit]

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 [edit]

  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

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