Some background: Mount Erie Fire Department (MEFD) has an awesome handbook in mediawiki, which contains SOPs, information on equipment we carry, and other very useful information. Sometimes one might want to reference the handbook without a robust internet connection (I'm looking at you, Bowman Bay). The idea of this scraper is to download a snapshot of the wiki for offline use on mobile devices.
The standard download format for full wikis in the mediawiki ecosystem is a ZIM file (.zim). You can read all about what's in a zim file and how to manipulate them on the OpenZIM wiki.
This repository uses the priceless tool mwoffliner to generate a zim file
for the MEFD wiki. Read all about it in its GitHub
repository. You can install
mwoffliner globally by running npm i -g mwoffliner on a system with
npm set up.
Ensure mwoffliner is installed on your system. You can check by running
mwoffliner --help.
To run the scraper:
./scrape.sh youremail@example.com
By default, it will put the resulting .zim file in a directory called
out.
The email address is just passed to the API as a sort of "this is who's hitting every page in the wiki" thing.
Download Kiwix for your platform and import the file.
- Mac: File -> Open -> select output file.
- iPhone: AirDrop the file to your phone, save it in files, ensure the Kiwix app is installed. In the app, go to Libraries, then add, then select the newly-downloaded .zim file and choose "move to Kiwix" (unless you want a copy in files too, but I promise zim files are not useful on their own). To actually open it, tap on MEFD in your library, then choose Open Main Page.
Sure! Download a possibly-out-of-date zim file at https://wxyzeph.com/mefd-latest.zim. If you want a more up-to-date version of the wiki, hassle Zeph for an update.