**Minipedia**
Reimagining a Solarpunk Wikipedia from/for Global South
By the [Grafoscopio][gf-en] Community
!!!
As infrastructures are enablers of participation, a more diverse inclusive Wikipedia will
be build when we (de)construct together, as equals, not only contents, but also content
enabling infrastructures and social practices around them.
Minipedia is a project that follows the [Grafoscopio][gf-en] Community principle of
"_simplifying infrastructure to amplify participation_", reimagining Wikipedia as an
enabler of Solarpunk([1][solarpunk-1],[2][solarpunk-1]) futures where the Global South
people are equals in building the Knowledge Commons by helping to blur the distintion between
(de)constructing contents and (de)constructing inclusive empowering interactive infrastructures,
easier to understand, use, extend, and modify.
Our working hypothesis is that will change the way we build Knowledge Commons contents together,
when we change the way we build together enabling infrastructures for those contents and the
people behind.
For our exploration and prototypes, we are using many of Wikipedia contents, while changing
the front-end and backend technologies and replacing them by what we have called
"[pocket infrastructures][infra-pocket]" (in Spanish), which are simple, self contained,
[local first](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html), extensible and able to run in
humble hardware and beyond.
With this approach we can create "slices" of Wikipedia with code and content that can be read,
written and executed in wider contexts, particularly those of the Global South, where we are
developing such approaches.
Our combination of pocket infrastructures include:
* [Grafoscopio][gf-en]'s interactive notebooks for documentation, scripting and/or data
exploration and visualization, with live coding support.
* [Markdeep][markdeep] for agile web exportation.
* [Pandoc][pandoc] for multiformat document import/export.
* [Fossil][fossil] for distributed data storage and collaboration.
* [Pharo][pharo] as the live coding computing environment and language that
binds all together and is used as a platform for future developments.
# Pre-requisites
* We suppose that you have already installed [Pharo][pharo] and that you are familiar with
open and executing [Playgrounds][playgrounds] in it.
* [Fossil][fossil] should be installed to download, store and synchronize
Minipedia slices.
* Familiarity with [Grafoscopio][gf-en] notebooks usage is advisable (but not strictly required).
# Install and Launch
We have two methods for installing Minipedia: a quick one, particularly suited for Unix variants,
including Gnu/Linux and macOS and a general one for the previous ones and Windows.
## Quick for Unix variants: Gnu/Linux flavors and macOS
Open a terminal, locate yourself in the folder your working installation and follow these steps.
* Install Pharo, Grafoscopio and Minipedia:
~~~bash linenumbers
wget -O- https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/minipedia/doc/tip/bootstrap.sh | bash
~~~
* Run the installation:
~~~bash linenumbers
./pharo-ui minipedia.xyz.image
~~~
where `xyz` is a unique number derived from the Pharo base that you used for building the
Minipedia, for example `ccd1f64`.
There is no step three. You are done and ready to work with Minipedia.
## General, for Gnu/Linux, macOS and Windows
This steps work on any operative system where Pharo runs, but lack the automatization
of the previous ones (mostly because Windows being several decades late in supporting bash
and decent scripting).
It is supposed that you have already installed Pharo, following the instructions in the
[Pharo web page][pharo], for your particular operative system.
After that, do the following:
* [Install Grafoscopio](https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/readme.md.html#overview/quickstart).
* Install Minipedia executing this script from a Playground
~~~Smalltalk linenumbers
Metacello new
smalltalkhubUser: 'Offray' project: 'Minipedia';
baseline: 'Minipedia';
load.
~~~
# Usage
* Load the interactive notebook by going to the main menu and doing
`Grafoscopio > Launch > Notebook from the Internet...`, as shown in the following image:
* Copy and paste the following address in the text box:
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/minipedia/doc/tip/minipedia.ston
after pressing Enter or clicking the `OK` button you should see an interactive notebook, similar to
this one:
* Start exploring Minipedia by using the interactive notebook and by executing the code there.
We advice to look for the notebook node about creating Minipedia slices.
We have offered a minimal example with the "Pharopedia", that you can addapt to create your
own slices.
To see the resulting Minipedia slice, you can visit the [Pharopedia repository][pharopedia].
# Slices and downloads
A Minipedia slice is a view of [Mediawiki][mediawiki] powered sites containing articles taken from
there and their history.
Other wiki engines and collaborative writing sofware, like CodiMD, that we use for our face to face
real time hackathons and editathons will be added in the future.
| Name | Status | Address | Short Description/Topic |
|------|--------|-----|-------------|
| Pharopedia | Deployed | https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/pharopedia | A demo slice, containing several things related with [Pharo][pharo]. |
| Ruralpedia | Deployed | https://fossil.tupale.co/ruralpedia/ | Rural development |
| Femipedia | Planned | Pending | Feminist editathons, [WomenInRed][wir] and other articles by the [FemHackCo][femhackco] community. |
| Indigepedia | Planned | Pending | Indigenous knowledge, build by indigenous communities. |
| Bogopedia | Planned | Pending | Bogotá City related (maybe a revival/extension of an old project with the same name). |
| Cajipedia | Planned | Pending | Cajicá Town related. |
To download one of those slices, you have two ways:
* As a zip file, containing only the last revision of each article.
* As a Fossil repository, with the previous content and all the history of it.
If you want to download the zip file, just add "`/zip`" to the Minipedia slice url, for example
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/pharopedia/zip downloads the last version of the Pharopedia.
If you want to download the complete historical repository, you will need to: 1) have installed
[Fossil][fossil], 2) to create a folder for your slice, 3) clone the slice repository and 4)
to open the repository.
This are the commands you need to run from your terminal the follow the last 3 steps.
Just remember replacing `pharopedia` by your chosen slice:
~~~~bash
mkdir Pharopedia
cd Pharopedia
fossil clone https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/pharopedia pharopedia.fossil
fossil open pharopedia.fossil
~~~~
# Questions, status and futures...
This is a young project (but has been cooking since long time), so we don't have a lot of
Frequently Asked Questions yet.
Anyway, one of the first that comes to mind is "why don't use projects like
[Kiwi](https://www.kiwix.org/) or [Quarry](https://quarry.wmflabs.org/) to get the
information we want for an offline first Wikipedia slice?".
The main reason is that, while pretty worthy, both projects can be an overkill when
you want a particular view/slice of Wikipedia, being them organized in much larger datasets
that the ones we want to collect (by languages, like the 16 GB English Wikipedia, or by
themes like the huge Wikimed), or keeping in them the same database structure of original
Mediawiki.
In contrast, the [Wikipedia API](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page), that we use
to collect the data we care about, allows custom views of the information we want and to
download it in pretty plain and self-explainatory formats (like
[JSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON)).
This helps us in simplifying the backend and front-end technologies, while keeping the minimal
assumptions for interoperability and allowing us to move in other frontiers, like live coding,
interactive documentation and/or simple distributed storage.
We have used this alternative highly interactive and minimalist approach before with
pretty good results, for example while building [Grafoscopio][gf-en], making Big Data
accesible and reproducible in the case of the [Panama Papers][panama-papers], porting the
[Data Jounalism Handbook][mapeda] and [Data Feminists book][datafem] to our pocket
infrastructures, or in the booklet about how we use them to [write and publish together in an
agile and resilient fashion][documentaton].
Certainly we are enjoying already the benefits of such approach in the project you are seing
and we hope to showcase it for a wider audience once our Wikipedia slices start to flourish.
As many Free, Libre, Open Culture (FLOC) projects, this project is done on a voluntary basis,
but also prioritizing practices and perspectives from/for the Global South.
This means that we are dealing with the usual possibilities and struggles of such FLOC
projects, from a particular context, where lack of money, free time, state welfare,
visibility and/or funding are common.
So, while our times can be slow, in the same sense of the slow food, slow life, building
a pretty much needed "slow cyber" in the times of rush, we will try to be welcoming and to
locate contexts and opportunies to bootstrap and continue the kind of explorations that this
alpha prototype is enabling.
For the moment, we are going to create slices of Minipedia for places, themes and subjects
which/who are not pretty visible in the common Wikipedia infrastructures, contents and dynamics,
like the [Trinidad and Tobago Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_and_Tobago) or
Feminists Editathons, mainly because we are closer to and pretty interested in such contexts
and people.
We will list the Wikipedia slices here, as we are developing them.
Also we hope to go beyond Wikipedia, because not all culture expressions are best served by
an encyclopedic form, as Internet Archive, Project Guttemberg, our own projects or indigenous
traditions have shown.
Plese see above for links to susbscribe to our RSS or fillout a ticket, so we can reach you back.
Any future inquires can be addressed also to info@deletethis.mutabit.com
[datafem]: https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/datafem
[documentaton]: https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/documentaton/
[femhackco]: https://docutopia.tupale.co/s/femhackco
[fossil]: https://fossil-scm.org/
[gf-en]: https://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/en.html
[infra-pocket]: https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/dataweek/doc/tip/wiki/infraestructuras-de-bolsillo.md
[mapeda]: https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda
[markdeep]: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
[mediawiki]: https://www.mediawiki.org/
[pandoc]: https://pandoc.org/
[panama-papers]: https://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1
[pharo]: https://pharo.org/
[pharopedia]: https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/pharopedia/
[playgrounds]: https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/pharo-wiki/blob/master/General/Playground.md
[solarpunk-1]: https://wiki.sunbeam.city/
[solarpunk-2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
[wir]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red