Kiwix is a project that offers users to view all of Wikipedia offline through their application. This is achieved by a portable application and archived database files. Wikipedia archives are stored in two formats, with images and without images. This allows users to choose files according to their requirement. Kiwix project works in many devices and has got apps for different operating systems to take advantage of Wikipedia wherever you go. And we have to thank Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin for creating this. Since 2007, it has grown to include more languages and articles from the Project Gutenberg. The only problem with this is you have to have plenty of disk space to use this properly. As even text version of Wikipedia uses more than 15Gb of data.
Many destinations in Nepal are still not connected to the internet, moreover Internet is costly to maintain for many households and schools. Having an offline archive of knowledge and information from around the world can benefit learning and also expose students and children to broad subjects.
While Wikipedia isn’t always accepted as a reference in your college report, it still is the largest collective knowledge created and curated by volunteers from all around the world. Which is infinitely better than the old and traditional textbooks in our country.
The interface of Kiwix application for Windows is quite straightforward and easy to get around. The database for being able to view images are quite large and may take some time while you search for topics. As the database for the articles and pictures are huge, it indexes the topics beforehand to do the search a lot faster than sequential searches. While it takes some time, it is quite fast considering the vast database it has to index. Once you download the complete application and database, the application is portable and will run without any installation on additional computers. As you uncompress the original archive, you are ready to share it with the people who are eager to use Wikipedia offline. You can also export the content in PDF and HTML format for printing and other purposes.
As we’ve downloaded the complete English database and tested it, it has worked perfectly well. We also downloaded the Wikipedia articles written in the Nepali language. This is an additional portion of the Wikipedia you can download the app. You can switch to the archive of your choice from the action bar. It has a stacked books icon and then choose “My Library” in the upcoming window.
Alongside Wikipedia, other content archives can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, User contributed Ubuntu Wiki, Ted talks conference, WikiMed, Rational Wiki, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikitionary, Wikisource, Crashcourse Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks and others as well.
We have the latest version containing Wikipedia offline database from 2016-12, and if you don’t want to waste your bandwidth or use it for schools or any educational institution, contact us and we can supply you with the application and the database for free. But you will need a external hard drive that can store over 70 Gb data.
