Pakistan to spend economic stimulus budget on… Microsoft?

Fouad Bajwa writes of an unusual deal between the Pakistani government and Microsoft, on the s-asia-it mailing list:

To all members of the IT Industry & Technical Community,

Everyone is well aware that global financial recession has hit even the Tech Giants where companies like Microsoft and Intel have being saying goodbye to thousands of their employees. The situation doesn’t seem to be getting better but interestingly our Pakistani National ICT R&D Fund is thinking about helping Microsoft in Pakistan and we from the industry feel that it is sad that instead of supporting local Hi-Tech Start-ups and struggling IT Entrepreneurs [they are]  funding the usual “Non-Useful” activities like conferences [and] so-called accelerator programs for Pakistan…

To be fair, they have funded a number of open source projects, and funding for conferences and other networking activities is always in short supply for those without a significant marketing budget.

I have come to know through my friends in the IT Industry that the National ICT R&D Fund has signed an MoU with Microsoft to fund the Microsoft Developers Conference and something called an “Innovators Accelerator Program”. The funds haven’t been disbursed yet but it definitely annoys me and many of my friends in the IT industry that our government should fund Microsoft initiatives which is already a global giant. I have heard that around 5 million rupees [about USD 60,000] or thereabouts for the innovation accelerator program which will involve Microsoft training, entrepreneurship training and connecting with Microsoft partners and similar amounts related.

I also find it strange that Pakistan would choose it invest money in Microsoft at this time, despite their obvious experience and competence with open source. Others come to the Fund’s defence, saying:

ICT R&D Fund is one of the few institutions in the country that are doing an excellent job… [it] is the role of a funding agency to encourage collaborations for promoting research cultures and provide help in bringing the best minds closer.

But nobody has denied that the Fund has signed an MoU with Microsoft, or argued for its benefit to Pakistan. Fouad also writes:

When will our national institutions support its people, the vulnerable, not the already empowered? Why doesn’t it support the local entrepreneurs, the ones that don’t have large companies or university backings? Why does it have liabilities to include universities whereas it knows what the state of R&D in universities has been except for a few handful? Why doesn’t it include this money for Social Enterprise and created a NATIONAL INCUBATION AND ACCELERATION CENTRE where people like me or you or anyone can walk in and build their ideas and companies?

Ashiq Anjum replies that “No funding agency can build incubators for industry, probably this is outside of their scope.” But the Fund’s stated goal is “To transform Pakistan’s economy into a knowledge based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable and effective ICT initiatives through synergic development of industrial and academic resources.”

It sounds entirely reasonable on this basis for them to assist university graduates in gaining skills that are useful in the knowledge industry, and in setting up their own companies in the knowledge industry. Indeed, another stated goal is to “make Pakistan an attractive destination for service oriented and research and development related outsourced jobs.”

We can establish centres like http://www.socialinnovation.ca/
and help local entrepreneurs in business development and social innovation with the same amount of money[.] That helps and benefits our people and companies directly as well as innovate for local and international markets.

I agree that all countries should support local development, training and entrepreneurship as much as possible.

Offline Wikipedia

I’m working on making Wikipedia, the (in)famous free encyclopaedia, available offline, for a project in a school in rural Zambia where Internet access will be slow, expensive and unreliable.

What I’m looking for is:

• Completely offline operation
• Runs on Linux
• Reasonable selection of content from English Wikipedia, preferably with some images
• Looks and feels like the Wikipedia website (e.g. accessed through a browser)
• Keyword search like the Wikipedia website

Tools that have built-in search engines usually require that you download a pages and articles dump file from Wikipedia (about 3 GB download) and then generate a search index, which can take from half an hour to five days.

For an open source project that seems ideally suited to being used offline, and considering the amount of interest, there are surprisingly few options (already developed). They also took me a long time to find, so I’m collating the information here in the hope that it will help others. Here are my impressions of the solutions that I’ve tried so far, gathered from various sources including makeuseof.com.

The One True Wikipedia, for comparison

MediaWiki (the Wikipedia wiki software) can be downloaded and installed on a computer configured as an AMP server (Apache, MySQL, PHP). You can then import a Wikipedia database dump and use the wiki offline. This is quite a complex process, and importing takes a long time, about 4 hours for the articles themselves (on a 3 GHz P4). Apparently it takes days to build the search index (I’m testing this at the moment). This method does not include any images, as the image dump is apparently 75 GB, and no longer appears to be available, and it displays some odd template codes in the text (shown in red below) which may confuse users.

Mediawiki local installation

Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a static website, created by Wikimedia and SOS Childrens Villages, with a hand-chosen and checked selection of articles from the main Wikipedia, and images, that fit on a DVD or 3GB of disk space. It’s available for free download using BitTorrent, which is rather slow. Although it looks like Wikipedia, it’s a static website, so while it’s easy to install, it has no search feature. It also has only 5,500 articles compared to the 2 million in Wikipedia itself (about 0.25%). Another review is on the Speed of Creativity Blog. Older versions are available here. (thanks BBC)

Wikipedia Selection for Schools

Zipedia is a Firefox plugin which loads and indexes a Wikipedia dump file. It requires a different dump file, containing the latest metadata (8 GB) instead of the usual one (3 GB). You can then access Wikipedia offline in your browser by going to a URL such as wikipedia://wiki. It does not support images, and the search feature only searches article titles, not their contents. You can pass the indexed data between users as a Zip file to save time and bandwidth, and you may be able to share this file between multiple users on a computer or a network. (thanks Ghacks.net)

WikiTaxi is a free Windows application which also loads and indexes Wikipedia dump files. It has its own user interface, which displays Wikipedia formatting properly (e.g. tables). It looks very nice, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t run on Linux.

WikiTaxi screenshot (wikitaxi.org)

Moulin Wiki is a project to develop open source offline distributions of Wikipedia content, based on the Kiwix browser. They claim that their 150 MB Arabic version contains an impressive 70,000 articles, and that their 1.5 GB French version contains the entire French Wikipedia, more than 700,000 articles. Unfortunately they have not yet released an English version.

Kiwix itself can be used to read a downloaded dump file, thereby giving access to the whole English Wikipedia via the 3 GB download. It runs on Linux only (as far as I know) and the user interface is a customised version of the Firefox browser. Unfortunately I could not get it to build on Ubuntu Hardy due to an incompatible change in Xulrunner. (Kiwix developers told me that a new version would be released before the end of November 2008, but I wasn’t able to test it yet).

Kiwix (and probably MoulinWiki)

Wikipedia Dump Reader is a KDE application which browses Wikipedia dump files. It generates an index on the first run, which took 5 hours on a 3 GHz P4, and you can’t use it until it’s finished. It doesn’t require extracting or uncompressing the dump file, so it’s efficient on disk space, and you can copy or share the index between computers. The display is in plain text, so it looks nothing like Wikipedia, and it includes some odd system codes in the output which could confuse users.

Wikipedia Dump Reader

Thanassis Tsiodras has created a set of scripts to extract Wikipedia article titles from the compressed dump, index them, parse and display them with a search engine. It’s a clever hack but the user interface is quite rough, it doesn’t always work, requires about two times the dump file size in additional data, it was a pain to figure out how to use it and get it working, and it looks nothing like Wikipedia, but better than the Dump Reader above.

Thanassis Tsiodras' Fast Wiki with Search

Pocket Wikipedia is designed for PDAs, but apparently runs on Linux and Windows as well. The interface looks a bit rough, and I haven’t tested the keyword search yet. It doesn’t say exactly how many articles it contains, but my guess is that it’s about 3% of Wikipedia. Unfortunately it’s closed source, and as it comes from Romania, I don’t trust it enough to run it. (thanks makeuseof.com)

Pocket Wikipedia on Linux (makeuseof.com)

Wikislice allows users to download part of Wikipedia and view it using the free Webaroo client. Unfortunately this client appears only to work on Windows. (thanks makeuseof.com)

WikiSlice (makeuseof.com)

Encyclopodia puts the open source project on an iPod, but I want to use it on Linux.

Encyclopodia

It appears that if you need search and Linux compatibility, then running a real Wikipedia (MediaWiki) server is probably the best option, despite the time taken.