Mission

The great Goals

Our target is to make Wiki content offline available, especially contents from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia.

The general goals we want to achieve:

the file format is the most efficient and works on all platforms, embedded devices and desktop computers
the file format is used by all kind of publishers and even outside the Wikimedia community
both reader applications and content files are freely interchangeable
everyone can implement software for this file format because it is an open and documented standard
there is at least one free implementation which is open source
the free implementation can be used easily in other software to make it easy to use the file format without having to implement it

compresses 900.000 articles (full german Wikipedia beginning 2009) to only 1.3 GB
features a fulltext search index
features native category and image handling similar to MediaWiki
is fully documented on this website - ZIM File Format
if you need help implementing it just contact our mailinglist
we are working on a ZIM File Archive to provide a central place to publish ZIM files including mirroring etc.

is all free and open source (GPL)
is based on ZIMlib, a library written in C++
provides a ZIMwriter to create ZIM files from a HTML dump (eg. a prepared database)
provides a ZIMreader as an example how to read ZIM files; ZIMreader acts as a local webserver
there are some more tools such as the ZIMdumper to have a look into ZIM files or check them

we are not going to create Wikipedia dumps or publishing own content in ZIM files
we are a team of volunteers and enthusiasts, not a business
we might not be able to provide you with a implementation in your favourite programming language
maybe we can not add a feature especially for you (if it doesn't fit in the openZIM goals)