Skip to content

Better exposure/support of older ZIMs using torrents #138

@rgaudin

Description

@rgaudin

Discussed in #137

Originally posted by JensKorte November 24, 2025
From https://kiwix.org/en/question-time-q4-2025/ :

Where can one download a pre-2022 (meaning pre-AI slop) of the English Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is probably still very much slop-free thanks to its myriad editors and a policy to shoot on sight if AI is suspected, but there is documented (attempted) use. The answer is via torrent, as people are still seeding older versions: here is December 2021 (93GB), May 2022 (pre-ChatGPT release; 95 GB). Archive.org also has several ZIM files hosted.

How about offering a webpage where all old torrents are listed and can be sorted and filtered. There could be a column where details are listed, if there are seeder or not. Even if that column gets updated once a day only it could be helpful.

Another idea is to build a subproject in github where the (old) torrents and maybe magnet files get listed and people can add Webseeds, e.g. archive.org, using pull requests. Instead of submitting the modified files only http(s) URLs could be listed and modified via merge request and scripts would generate the complete torrent and magnet files.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions