Wikipedia has grown massive in the recent years with more than 3 million articles just in English and more are being added and modified each day. It is run by internet volunteers who save some time to edit and add content to Wikipedia. Wikipedia now offer vast range or knowledge on many of the topics we know. One thing we can say is that it has become a big warehouse of knowledge.
But what would you do if you could download Wikipedia completely into your drive and go through it when you want it. Well Wikipedia does a regular backup or dump to its database and files so that they can be kept safe in cause of a catastrophe. This helps Wikipedia get back up with a backup without loosing everything.
Download Wikipedia in HTML (June 2008, Discontinued)
http://static.wikipedia.org/
Download Wikipedia Database dumps in various languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Latest English Wikipedia Database dump
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
Applications for Offline viewing
WikiTaxi (XML Database)
WikiTaxi is a application which imports the Wikipedia xml database for you to browse any part of Wikipedia while you’re offline. You need this application and the xml dump of the Wikipedia. This application lets you view only the text contents of the Wikipedia, but with the latest database you’ll be having the latest updates.
Download WikiTaxi here:
http://wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index
Kiwix (Text And Images)
Kiwix is an open source application that helps viewing Wikipedia offline. It uses zim file format as a base for Wikipedia download. And it is available on Windows, Linux and Mac. And it supports multiple languages from Wikipedia namely en, fr, es, de, it, ar, he, pt. You can view both images and text with Kiwix but the database isn’t quite up to date.
To use the application you first have to download the application from
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page#Downloads
Then get the zim Wikipedia file on the language you want from:
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page#Wikipedia_files
Pocket Wikipedia (HTML with Images)
Pocket Wikipedia is a application that works on Windows, Linux and Pocket PC. Pocket Wikipedia is an hand checked collection of different subjects on Wikipedia which is about the size of a fifteen volume Encyclopaedia with 24,000 images and 14 million words. You can download the Pocket Wikipedia from the following link.
http://www.free-soft.ro/pocket-wikipedia/pocket-wikipedia.html
So that’s all about downloading Wikipedia to your drive and viewing it when you want. These options can be used for schools, and various other education purposes.
