Kiwix has been around for a very long time. I'm not sure what's new that's brought it back to HN. Would love to know if there's actual news.
The ZIM format it relies on has been unsupported by upstream MediaWiki and in limbo for years, as has the Collection extension that collates content for it. Wikimedia have gone through two different offline content production services (OCG, Proton) and removed ZIM support in the process, but now farm that out to a commercial service, Pediapress, that doesn't produce ZIM archives and is focused more on producing paid print copies.
While Kiwix still generates and maintains ZIM dumps of sites, the process for others to roll their own offline wiki archives is more complex, fragile, and requires the wiki to run the optional Parsoid node service (which itself has a somewhat cloudy future, as it might be ported back into PHP and integrated into the MediaWiki core).
Meanwhile, Wikimedia produces their own Android app capable of caching offline content... but hasn't supported rebuilding that app to support non-Wikimedia MediaWiki installations, since it relies on often experimental hooks developed specifically for their app, which are difficult to deploy on stock MediaWiki (and impossible on most LTS versions).
The ZIM format it relies on has been unsupported by upstream MediaWiki and in limbo for years, as has the Collection extension that collates content for it. Wikimedia have gone through two different offline content production services (OCG, Proton) and removed ZIM support in the process, but now farm that out to a commercial service, Pediapress, that doesn't produce ZIM archives and is focused more on producing paid print copies.
While Kiwix still generates and maintains ZIM dumps of sites, the process for others to roll their own offline wiki archives is more complex, fragile, and requires the wiki to run the optional Parsoid node service (which itself has a somewhat cloudy future, as it might be ported back into PHP and integrated into the MediaWiki core).
Meanwhile, Wikimedia produces their own Android app capable of caching offline content... but hasn't supported rebuilding that app to support non-Wikimedia MediaWiki installations, since it relies on often experimental hooks developed specifically for their app, which are difficult to deploy on stock MediaWiki (and impossible on most LTS versions).