On 16th October 2011, I have uploaded a map of Tamilnadu District wise Literacy levels to Wikipedia. It was used in the article about Tamilnadu for a long time, then moved to the Education in Tamilnadu article when a separate article was created. But the map was not in line with the Wikipedia Map Conventions. So, took some time this week and updated the map.
Chetpet Lake has been developed into a nice waterfront park for walking a few years back. It is maintained diligently with water level balanced between the two parts of the lake depending on the availability, grass moved, plants cared for and the walkways washed off the bird droppings everyday morning. It opens for walkers as early as 4.30 in the morning every day. It is one of the places in Chennai, that I have walked into and really felt peaceful.
It has boating, children’s play area, angling points, 3D theatre, multilevel car park, and a food court. It is well connected by public transport. It has a bus stop, a railway station, and a metro station right outside its walls. But, it didn’t have a map. So, I downloaded a PDF from OpenStreetMap and created one which is now used in Chetput Lake Wikipedia article.
Typing tutor is a known ancient domain to work on. There are a number of places online/offline, tangible/intangible places to learn typing. But Srikanth (@logic) stumbled on a peculiar problem when worked for the Wikimedia Language Engineering team. The new age Indic input methods involved in computers seem to have no place to learn how to type on them. The only way seems to be – have a visual reference for the layout and begin typing one key at a time. This might be the most inefficient method of learning to input information. So what do we do?
Thattachu is an open source typing tutor. It is built using the tool that Wikimedia Language Engineering Team have developed called jQuery IME. jquery.ime currently supports 62 languages and 150+ input methods. This is a JavaScript library which can be used on any web page. So we (I & Srikanth) set out to build a generic typing tutor which could employ any of the 62 languages or 150+ input methods. The project was conceived in May 2014 and was worked on only by May 2015 as I was busy with my Teach For India Fellowship. Thattachu borrows its tutor style from GNU Typist or gTypist which I used to learn touch typing in English.
Thattachu has three pages:
Each language has a set of input methods – each input method has a set of courses. The courses are classified based on their difficulty as “Beginner”, “Intermediate” and “Expert”. Each course has a set of lessons to complete and and each lesson is a collection of lines that have to be typed.
Creating the tool is the easier part of a content dependent system. The real work is generating the content that the tool can be used with. That way we faced the challenge of creating course.JSON files required for the tool. Hence a user friendly tool Thattachu Asiriyar was born.
Thattachu Asiriyar lets anyone author a course and generate a course file. If you want to author courses, go to Thattachu Asiriyar create the course file and mail it to
arun [at] arunmozhi [dot] in -mentioning “Thattachu course” in the subject.
Or if you have a Github account and know about pull requests. Kindly
Here are a few points for those interested in the code or those who think they can improve Thattachu.
OpenZim is a Wikimedia developed format for offline reading of Wikipedia. Read more here. But the project was sadly sidelined and the support from MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia sites, was also removed.
I came to know about all this from Bala Jeyaraman of Vasippu. He is planning to introduce tablets in a classroom of 6th standard students, with exceptional comprehension levels compared to average Indian classrooms, and wanted a way to load select material into the tablets. The OpenZim files have an excellent reading app called Kiwix, which also offers complete Wiki sites as downloads. Tablets can’t afford to have a huge amount of data, like full Wikipedia. There is no way to create a zim file with select topics. One has to request the OpenZim team to do it for him/her.
Zimbalaka is a project which tries to solve just that. It creates offline wikipedia content files in zim file format. A person can input a list of pages that need to be created as a zim, or at least a Wikipedia category. Then Zimbalaka downloads those pages, removes all the clutter like sidebar, toolbox, edit links …etc., and gives a cleaned version as a zim file for download. It can be opened in Kiwix.
The zim is created with a simple welcome page with all the pages as a list of links. The openzim format also has an inbuilt search index and Kiwix uses this really well. So you can create zims of 100 articles and still navigate to them easily either way.
Zimbalaka has multi-lingual and multi-site support. That is, you can create a zim file from pages of any language of the 280+ existing Wikipedias, and also from sites like Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiversity and such. You can even input any custom URL like (http://sub.domain.com/), Zimblaka would add (/wiki/Page_title) to it and download the pages.
It is currently hosted by my good friend Srikanth (@logic) at http://srik.me/zimbalaka
Here is how the content looks in Kiwix for Android.
This tool is written using Flask – A simple Python web framework for the backend, Bootstrap as the frontend and uses the zimwriterfs compiled binary as the workhorse. The zimming tasks are run by Celery, which has been automated by supervisord. All the coordination and message passing happen via Redis.
Do you want to peek in how it is all done? Here is the source code [https://github.com/tecoholic/Zimbalaka]. Feel free to fork, modify and host your own instance.
The OpenZim team has appreciated the effort I had put in and offered to host the tool on their server at http://zimbalaka.openzim.org. They have also pointed me to the desired backend called ‘mwoffliner’ that they have developed to download and clean the HTML. I will be working on it in my free time.
Arunmozhi 