What are the WikiTaxi command line parameters?

WikiTaxi.exe currently takes two command line arguments:

WikiTaxi.exe <Database File> <Page Name>

Please note that the page name must match exactly (including case!). If it contains white space, it must be wrapped in quotation marks. This example will start WikiTaxi, open the English.taxi database and display the page on "Albert Einstein":

WikiTaxi.exe English.taxi "Albert Einstein"

Please check this list before suggesting new features!

WikiTaxi for other operating systems: Linux & Max OS X, Symbian

WikiTaxi is Win32 only. There are reports on the Internet that WikiTaxi runs well on Linux using the Wine compatability layer. Max OS X or Symbian are unsupported.

Yes, just tested. WikiTaxi works great (Import and all!). In Ubuntu install package with Synaptic Package Mgr. Then Wine appears on the bottom of the Applications Menu. Run "Browse C:\" Double Click on WikiTaxi Importer, select file and enter output database name. Click Execute. Close after finish. Go back to Wine C:\ browser, double click on WikiTaxi. Scroll down the opening page 1 screen and click on hyperlink "Open File" browse to the just created Wiki Database from Importer and you are in. Enter search term in top line. Thank you so much for making WikiTaxi! M

Full-text search

Full text article search requires considerable drive space to store the inverted index. Since the database size is already quite large for some Wikis, there is no article search right now. However, this might change in a future version.

<MATH> formulas made with Tex are not displayed

Bzreader(another Wiki dump reader) adopted MimeTeX application to enable TeX formula display. It would be better for WikiTaxi to incorporate such similar applications.

WikiTaxi does not have TeX support. It would be far too complex to implement in a single executable. Know a simple solution? Please share!

Some form of image support

Taking Wikipedia images offline is a question of size: All images make sum up to more than 400 GB in total! I am not yet sure if this is the right thing to do for WikiTaxi.

If it's mostly a matter of size and not coding to display images, perhaps a slider to choose maximum individual image size in bytes or maximum total byte size of all images; both of which would sort images from smallest image size in bytes to largest, and add images until limit is reached, or all images with a maximum per-image byte size, and deresolve/decimate larger images until they meet that byte size.

Category pages working as list of articles in that Category (the same way as at Wiki)

Category listings add to the database size. Import time will also take longer because an extra database scan is required to extract categories. This is planned for a future version.

Create wiki backups for a specified page

During WikiTaxi design I kept in mind downloading or updating selected Wiki pages from MediaWiki servers using the Special:Export extension, but this has not been implemented yet.

I'd like to see WikiTaxi_Importer.exe work on the command line (and possibly a linux-statically compiled version) to that I can automate the translation process

Noted, but this is low priority only.

Support for the ParserFunctions extension

WikiTaxi has ever since supported parser functions. If you find that a parser function is missing, please send an e-mail. In particular, the following are included.

Core parser functions: anchorencode, DEFAULTSORT, DISPLAYTITLE, formatnum, fullurl, lc, lcfirst, ns, padleft, padright, #tag, uc, ucfirst, urlencode.

Parser functions: #expr, #if, #ifeq, #iferror, #ifexist, #ifexpr, #switch, #time, #titleparts

Support for the importer to work with the uncompressed XML file

WikiMedia provides these as BZ2 but some wikis (like those on Wikia and possibly others) provide it as GZ instead. It'd be great if you could just uncompress the XML and use it, rather than having to uncompress, then recompress as BZ2.

Save pages to HTML files

Bonus if we can dump the whole contents of the .taxi out as a directory of HTML files for use on obscure platforms.

Wikipedia already provides this service: http://static.wikipedia.org/ But the expanded HTML is much larger than the compressed WikiTaxi database.

But Wikia and many other Wikis do not, but do provide the XML. This would also allow cut & paste without need to make changes to the built-in HTML viewer.

Copy to the clipboard from the HTML view

I'm sure there's a good reason we can't do this at the moment, but I can't imagine what it is.

Clipboard copying is currently not available for the build-in HTML viewer.

Then how about copying from Wiki Source view ?

Support for Right-to-Left layout for Hebrew and Arabic

Bi-directional text layout is unfortunately unsupported by the build-in HTML viewer.

Ability to bookmark pages for easy access next time

Noted, but focus right now is on improving the MediaWiki parser.

A triple-click to select the whole search line

Possibility to work with tabs (maybe even fixed number of tabs) in order to have more than one article open at once (this is maybe simple than the comment below)

Possibility to open links in tabs with the right mouse button

This will be low-priority. Focus is on parser improvements.

Print from HTML view and/or Wiki Source view

Split into and use under-4GiB FAT32-friendly set of .taxi files

Being able to have a set of .taxi files, each under the 4GiB FAT32 filesize limit, would be helpful – specifically to put it on a non-NTFS flash drive.

Namespace-aliases

Especially WP: as a short form for Wikipedia: doesn't work.

Add links to the Headlines (like the edit links in Wikipedia) to jump directly to that section in the source code

I'd like to see the WikiTaxi being free software (GPL, BSD, etc.)

WikiTaxi is free software already. If you are interested in the sources, please let me know how you would like to contribute to the WikiTaxi development: mail@wikitaxi.org

Source code of the Wiki-to-HTML converter?

Is it possible to have the source code of the Wiki-to-HTML converter that you have used in WikiTaxi?

The WikiTaxi source code is not freely available. If you are interested, please e-mail to mail@wikitaxi.org about how you would like to contribute to the WikiTaxi development.

Format of WikiTaxi's *.taxi database?

Is it possible to have the format of your database so that your data may be used for processing in other platforms?

Third party applications or platforms would likely be better off importing the *.xml dump into their specific data structure. If you have a particular idea, you are welcome to share your thoughts at mail@wikitaxi.org.

Links with percent encoding / URL encoding do not work

Links which contain percent / URL encoded characters (%22) do not work.

This fix requires rewriting substantial parts of WikiTaxi and will be addressed in a future version.

On Red-Hyperlinks

'Red'-hyperlinks (hyperlinks to lemmas that have not been written, i.e. hyperlinks it nowere) in Wikipedia are converted to 'blue'-hyperlinks by WikiTaxi. I would suggest the conversion of the red links to plain text.

Does not Import

When I try to Import a database in the importer the text box just stays blank. So I can't get it to work.

This bug report does not provide any information to reproduce your problem. Please elaborate.

Note: I suspect that your problems result from corrupted *.xml.bz2 file downloads. Please verify their MD5 checksums against those listed on the Wikipedia download page.

Note: Am just trying it now but it seems to make it work to "write the whole path of the .bz2 file manually" ! try it ! so do not use the browse button ! Anonymous

This seems to point to a Windows Vista file open dialog incompatibility which showed in an earlier version of WikiTaxi. I has since been fixed. Please download the latest version and try again. WikiTaxi Developer

Still don't work in 1.0.6. on Vista.

Same problem on Windows 7 build 7100. Browse button doesn't select file, and manually typing the path\file also fails.

In Properties, choice to run win windows XP mode

problem with the last dump of wikipedia in spanish

I have a problem with the last dump of wikipedia in spanish, the page load and render with another pages inside, I think it's because wikipedia changed the name of the templates, for example when i load an article about a person in the field of age is another article instead the age. I don't know if I explain good, because write in english is too dificult for me now. Thanks in advance.

Spanish Wikipedia Problem

First of all, I would like to thank you for doing this program. It's awesome. I was always looking for a program that could do the same very functions WikiTaxi does. I'm glad I found you :)

I've downloaded different dated bz2 files, converted them to WikiTaxi Format, and there's a problem, a 40% of the articles appear mixed with other articles. There's no missing info. They just appear with content from other random articles. I hope you can help me. I mean, At home I have the bz2 file of a backup from 2008, and it works great. The issue is in the last months version.

This is not a WikiTaxi problem but caused by wrong templates' contents like in eswiki-20090825-pages-articles.xml.bz2.

Take the article on "Ellen Muth", for example. It includes the template "Plantilla:Edad". To see its bad contents, extract the above *.bz2 file to eswiki-20090825-pages-articles.xml and open it with a hex editor. Then search for "Plantilla:Edad" or go directly to hex offset 66B7A479. The <text> there is clearly not the "Plantilla:Edad" template. Therefore I suppose some export problems or a bug in the export generator which was "MediaWiki 1.16alpha-wmf".

2010-02-22: I received an e-mail today which confirms that this problem is indeed caused by a Spanish Wikipedia export bug. The full report is available here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18694.

Unfortunately, no date has yet been schedule for a fix. For the time being, the recommended workaround is to download the pages-meta-current.xml.bz2 file instead of the usual pages-articles.xml.bz2 dump. Ralf