in MediaWiki

tagged board, governance, mediawiki, wikimedia

Final day for voting in the WMF Board Election

As I posted about earlier, the election for the WMF Board of Trustees is wrapping up. Today is the final day for voting, it closes at 23:59 September 6 UTC (in your local timezone).

You should:

Thank you to everyone who has already voted and is encouraging other Wikimedians to vote. This is an incredibly important election and every vote counts.

in MediaWiki

tagged debian, kiwix, offline, wikipedia

Kiwix in Debian, 2022 update

Previous updates: 2018, 2021

Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017.

This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for new libzim and libkiwix versions.

  • libzim: 6.3.0 → 8.0.0
  • zim-tools: 2.1.0 → 3.1.1
  • python-libzim: 0.0.3 → 1.1.1 (with a cherry-picked patch)
  • libkiwix: 9.4.1 → 11.0.0 (with DFSG issues fixed!)
  • kiwix-tools: 3.1.2 → 3.3.0
  • kiwix (desktop): 2.0.5 → 2.2.2

The Debian Package Tracker makes it really easy to keep an eye on all Kiwix-related packages.

All of the "user-facing" packages (zim-tools, kiwix-tools, kiwix) now have very basic autopkgtests that can provide a bit of confidence that the package isn't totally broken. I recommend reading the "FAQ for package maintainers" to learn about all the benefits you get from having autopkgtests.

Finally, back in March I wrote a blog post, How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix, which got significant readership (compared to most posts on this blog), including being quoted by LWN!

We are always looking for more contributors, please reach out if you're interested. The Kiwix team is one of my favorite groups of people to work with and they love Debian too.

in MediaWiki

tagged board, governance, mediawiki, wikimedia

Vote for me in the WMF Board Election

I am currently running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board. You can read my answers to community questions and see the endorsements from other Wikimedians. Voting opens in a few hours and runs through September 6.

The best way to support me in the election is:

  • Vote using SecurePoll
  • Rank me first.
  • Reach out to 5 other Wikimedians you know and get them to vote as well

You can also boost my posts on Mastodon and Twitter. Thanks!