Help/FAQs

I've found a bug. How do I report it?

Report it through Github, Wikipedia or by email! See Help/Feedback

How do you pronounce XOWA?

The preferred pronunciation is "X' - O - WA". In IPA, it would be ɛksˈ ō wə.

An accepted pronunciation is "ZO' - WA". In IPA, it would be zō wə.

Why are language links to other wikis not listed?

Short answer: Set up the Wikidata wiki (www.wikidata.org). See Dashboard/Import/Online. After you install the Wikidata wiki, language links to other wikis will be listed at the bottom of the article.

Long answer: See App/Wiki_types/Wikidata

Why do some pages have sections that overlap each other?

Short answer: Images are necessary for some pages to show correctly. (for example, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Main_Page).

Long answer: Some pages have divs that auto-size to their image. If the images are not downloaded, then the divs auto-size around nothing, causing a "collapsed" look. Unfortunately, since there is no image size info in the wikitext, there is little XOWA can do to "force" the div to the correct size.

How do I print a page?

From the Main Menu, choose File -> Print!

Why does <rss> show up?

The <rss> tag is used on some wikis. For example, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page uses it in their "Recent Wikimedia blog posts"

XOWA doesn't implement the rss tag, because RSS feeds are not available offline. Note the tag is not hidden, because it could be more confusing to see empty space, rather than the literal rss tag.

Why do some characters show up as boxes?

Certain articles will have non-English characters that will only be displayed correctly if the proper font is installed

• Arabic: Italicized text may show up as boxes. Install the fonts at /xowa/bin/any/font/arabic/amiri or at http://www.amirifont.org/
• Ugaritic: Install the fonts from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/freefont-ttf-20120503.zip
• Cuneiform: Install the fonts from http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/downloads/CuneiformComposite-1001.zip (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support#Cuneiform and http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/fonts/#Cuneiform_Fonts)

Why are some date-related pages empty or show error messages?

For example, if today's date is 2019-02-15, and you open en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/2019_February_15 in XOWA, it will not show correctly

This is because Wikipedia has bots which will automatically create pages for the current / next day. In contrast, XOWA snapshots whatever pages were in the Wikipedia dump. So a 2019-02 dump will only have pages up to 2019-02-01, and not 2019-02-15. XOWA does not reproduce the bot logic for automaticaly creating new pages.

For more info, see https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/367.