Is there any type of pdf version of the wiki?
Preferably every page.
Thanks in advance.
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I don’t know if there is any way to print the entire thing, but at the bottom of each page there is a link to a “Printable version” which when clicked, brings up a print dialogue and you can then “Save to PDF”. It only saves that page though.
I realise it would be quite tedious to open each page and print/save, but it does mean that you can update portions when required. Being a Wiki it changes all the time.
I’d second Monique’s point that as a wiki, the content does get updated regularly, so a PDF version would get out of date fairly quickly.
But tagging @philip, as I know this is something we’ve talked about in the past 
It doesn’t get updated that often, so a printed version woud have a reasonable life. But thinking it through…
A5 booklet form would be nice. But a quick test has just shown me that 200 words 11pt Calibri fit comfortably on an A5 page (no pics). I forget the latest Wiki word count, but it’s over 120,000. So that means 600 pages! And hot links don’t work on paper. I just copied and pasted the Glossary into an A5 Word doc and that alone (29,500 words, no pics) came to over 100 pages.
If you want the wiki in a portable off-grid format, it would be better as an e-book. A quick online search has just thrown up https://www.vertopal.com/en/convert/wiki-mediawiki-to-epub but I haven’t tried it. I guess a bit of scripting would be required to feed all the Wiki pages in and collect the results.
But before we go too far down this particuar rabbit hole, who would want a printed or e-book version? It’d be nice to have a copy you could slip in your pocket or leave on the Welcome desk at a repair event, but in reality, most of us have mobile data these days and could consult the online version most of the time. What exactly is your use case, @Jakub ?
A slightly more radical idea occurred to me a day or two ago. What would be involved in feeding it all into an LLM, and what level of sensible answers would the LLM then be able to deliver to questions relating to the content? I put a question to ChatGPT yesterday which said it was entirely possible, and this is how you’d do it… But I didn’t altogether understand the This-is-how-you’d-do-it bit of the answer. Definitely something we should look at.
I tried a little project using LLM on the Restart Wiki using PrivateGPT over a year ago. Requires some half decent hardware. I made an attempt to estimate the carbon emissions also - it would be pointless running repair events if we cancel out carbon savings with an LLM fixers resource. Anyway, I was underwhelmed with the slow responses and the content compared to the easy navigation of the Wiki. I’ll see if I can find what I wrote about it at the time. It seems like PrivateGPT has moved on considerably since then so perhaps I’ll spin it up the old project over the holiday break to see how it fares now.
Bear in mind that the Wiki is multi-lingual so you’d need a multi-lingual LLM or an LLM for each language. My project trained an English-only model.
Excellent, @Monique! I’ll be interested in your results, doubly so if you can give me access to the model to play with! Performance might be just a question of how much you’re prepared to pay for hosting the LLM. How much of the carbon footprint is 1-off training and how much is interrogation and updating of the model?
I have scrpts for exporting all Englist pages as plain text. Let me know if you’d like them or the output.
Actually, we have only a small proportion of the Wiki translated (the most frequently used pages) so we need to fix that (a big job) before thinking about a multi-lingual AI. Though I’ve just asked ChatGPT and it said “Yes, I can draw upon English training data to answer questions in French. While much of my training data is in English, I can translate the relevant information into French and provide detailed and accurate responses in that language. This can be especially useful for topics where French-language materials are scarce.”
So this might be a viable alternative to translating the remaining ~100,000 words of English into multiple languages - certaily worth thinking about.
Coming to the social tonight, @Monique ? Chat then!
Not sure if the interest is to have it printed or offline. If the latter, https://kiwix.org/en/ might be a solution.