How To Download Wikipedia Offline

Kiwix, Wikipedia offline. Kiwix Team Books & Reference. You can select which additional content you would like to download (Wikipedia. Jump to Offline Wikipedia readers - Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline: XOWA: § XOWA; Kiwix: (§ Kiwix); WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for. Sep 6, 2013 - To start getting your own offline Wikipedia, you'll be downloading a Wikipedia database file and the WikiTaxi application from the Internet. The application has the offline Wikipedia viewer and importer you need. Then you'll be importing the database file into a WikiTaxi database you can use. How to Download All of Wikipedia Onto a USB Flash Drive. Wikipedia creates a download of its database on a regular basis that is literally just sitting there for you to download it.

We all know that Wikipedia is the largest online knowledge vault, where people hang-on to get all kinds of information. But this information source is available online and you need an internet connection to get the information, how about having an offline copy of Wikipedia?

KIWIX lets you access free knowledge – even offline Store Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg on your mobile phone easily. Download KIWIX Support KIWIX. KIWIX provides free software to bring free knowledge even to remote places. This may be a school on the countryside in a developing country. This may be you on a plane or in the wilderness. Download the Wikislice (part of Wikipedia) offline if the number of pages is less than 2000. The downloaded pages can be used with the Webaroo software. The app will check if you have the software installed on first use.

We all know that we can build a website like Wikipedia but taking an offline copy is something new isn’t it? Let us quickly see how to do that.

Kiwix is the software that brings Wikipedia in your palm. Kiwix is basically an offline reader for web content and can be used for many other things. Let us see how to use Kiwix to setup your offline Wikipedia.

Download and Install Kiwix

  • You can download Kiwix here and is available for Windows, Mac OSX, Android, and Linux.
  • There is a portable version (34.6 MB) available for windows and I am just going to download it for this article.
  • Extract the downloaded kiwix-0.9-rc2-win.zip file.
  • When you open the extracted files folder, you should see two folders – install and kiwix. Open the kiwix folder.
  • Run the kiwix.exe application file.
  • When you start kiwix for the first time you should see a dialog box that prompts you to download remote catalog of available books. Click Yes.
  • Next you will be presented with another dialog as shown below, click OK.
  • The catalog will be retrieved and displayed to you in Kiwix Library as shown below.

So we were talking about downloading the entire Wikipedia isn’t it? but I never spoke about the size, did i? If I had mentioned about the size you wouldn’t have even bothered to read till this far But wait there are some interesting stuff that I want to show you and before that let me show you how to setup your offline Wikipedia.

Setup Your Offline Wikipedia

Let us just find the Wikipedia ZIM file, Kiwix supports ZIM format and hence you would just have to feed a .ZIM file.

In the Kiwix Library, under search ZIM files type Wikipedia and pick the Language that you could possibly read. I have chosen English and I can see a list of ZIM files that match my criteria are displayed.

As yes, the size of Offline Wikipedia is 39.96 GB, with proper internet connectivity and bandwidth you should be able to download the file and setup your offline Wikipedia. You could also see another ZIM file that gives Wikipedia without images sized at 11.77 GB.

There are also other variations like,

  • Wikipedia Selection for Schools holds 6000 articles and comes at a size of 4.5 GB.
  • The free encyclopedia in simple English holds 99,150 articles plus 86,073 Medias and comes at a size of 1.75 GB.

Pick the one that suits you and start enjoying Wikipedia offline too.

Now let’s head to the interesting part, we all know that Wiki also has other projects like Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, etc. All these can be downloaded individually through Kiwix Library.

If you are unable to download the ZIM file from the kiwix library, the reason is because of the mirror website unavailability and you won’t see an error message that tells you the problem. In such case you can directly head to the below link and download the ZIM file, if the mirror website is unavailable then you will at least know it.

I just downloaded the WikiVoyage(no pictures) ZIM file (wikivoyage_en_all_nopic_06_2014.zim) which comes at the size of 65 MB.

Once you have downloaded the ZIM file, just click File -> Open file option from kiwix library and select the ZIM file from your system. You now have the offline copy of your wiki. The search is very powerful so you can also make use of it to quickly find articles that you are interested in.

There is also a ZIM compatible webserver available called Kiwix-serve that allows you to serve the offline wiki over your network. I haven’t tried this, so if someone is already using this or tried this, please share your experiences over here.

Installing and setting up an offline Wikipedia is a one time job, but since ZIM files cannot be updated you have again download the latest version in order to view the updated information.

Kiwix is highly preferred in schools, libraries and universities but why not at home? Try it and let me know how it went. Found this article useful? Just spread the knowledge.

Are you a big fan of Wikipedia and wondering how to read the big Wikipedia offline? There are several times we want to read a few articles about a topic on Wikipedia or about some topics related to some specific category. If you have a limited bandwidth or a slow connection, you cannot access to the site all time. The best way to get a few pages from Wikipedia for offline reading is creating a PDF file of the page or create a book about the topic of interest. But it have some limitations, it is not easy to copy all the documents associated with a topic as a PDF document. So a software to read the Wikipedia offline is a boon. Here I am going to introduce some of the highly useful and widely used tools to read Wikipedia offline.

The first step is to download the Wikipedia database. Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries. The database dumps are available as .xml.bz2 files that can easily open using some free offline Wikipedia reader software.

Kiwix

Download Wikipedia

(http://www.kiwix.org/)

Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content. The software is intended to make Wikipedia available offline. The software can read the ZIM files, a highly compressed open format with additional meta-data. To read the Wikipedia articles offline, download the Zim file relating to the specific Wikipedia you want. There are several languages of Wikipedia available, you can see their size and last-date update and can be download from Kiwix site. There are two options to download for each non-indexed and pre-indexed versions. In direct download method you can download the file directly from Wikimedia servers. In Bittorent method you can download the file with a torrent software. The Kiwix software have some advanced features like, bookmarks and notes , ZIM based HTTP server, PDF/HTML export , localized in more than 80 languages, Search suggestions, ZIM file Index capacity, tabs navigation and integrated content manager or downloader.

WikiTaxi

(Download wikitaxi)

Wikitaxi is a free toll which enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. WikiTaxi equipped with an importer that will first un-compress the Wikipedia database files (.bz2) and then converts them into a .taxi file format. For the first time users, the time showing on for loading the database may not be accurate, just wait a few minutes- the Wikipedia database files will convert to .taxi file format within a few minutes-the speed depends on your computer speed.

Pocket Wikipedia

(Download Pocket Wikipedia)

Pocket Wikipedia, hand-checked selection from Wikipedia which is about the size of a fifteen volume encyclopaedia. This application it’s a freeware software, works on PocketPC, Windows and Linux.

Wiki Offline

(Download from iTunes)

How

Wiki Offline is an app for iPhone/iPad/iPod mobile devices, the app delivers flexibility and joy for the Wikipedia experience. The full text of all Wikipedia articles are stored to your iPhone/iPad/iPod.

How To Download Wikipedia Offline Free


What you think about this list? Which tool you are using to read Wikipedia offline? Can you suggest any new tools to read Wikipedia offline?