Given the recent attacks on Wikipedia by Musk and his cronies, I have a strong feeling that the site will be forced offline within the next year or so. So I’d like to preserve its content, at least for my use – and it may come in handy after the apocalypse, when the survival of my band of misfits hinges on knowing the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow.
Wikipedia offers a way to download the content as a Very Large File. I did so about a month ago and stored the file on my server in the basement.
But I would like to confirm that I can actually use/display this content. The list of possible software for this is very confusing, and so far I haven’t found a combination that works with my Very Large File. I have Windows and Linux computers, plus Android and iOS devices. It would be nice if at least one of those worked.
Has anybody here succeeded at operating an offline Wikipedia archive?
This may be considered a hijack, but can you provide a cite showing there is a credible risk of Wikipedia being “forced offline”? Musk and his cronies may not like it, but Wikipedia isn’t breaking any laws, as far as I know, and we still have the first amendment the last time I checked.
My goal is to operate Wikipedia, at least the English part, entirely on my LAN with no Internet connection. In an ideal world this would include pictures and media, but those would probably not fit on my 3-terabyte disk.
I installed XOWA first, then found out the readily-available Wikipedia content was from 2019, or 2017 in some alternate sources.
So I also installed Kiwix, which works on Linux or Windows or various other platforms, as the video above hints. The Kiwix ecosystem provides easy access to fresh Wikipedia content (2024 apparently), and also offers much more (TED content, LEGO answers, Stack Overflow, etc.). That will give me much to consume in my bunker as the apocalypse unfolds!
As a first step, right now I have a usable Wikipedia in English without images, I’m looking at what to download next.
Once you have Kiwix installed, the built-in browser may or may not allow you to view a content list.
You can visit kiwik.org, and eventually you get to this library page showing a bunch of content, which you can filter by language and topic. If you click on a thumbnail, you end up viewing the content online with no way to download it. If you want to download the corresponding .Zim file (which is the whole point), go back to the list of thumbnails, and click on the little cyan rectangle, within the thumbnail, that says “Download”. Then you get a pop-up giving a choice of a direct download or a BitTorrent file or Magnet link.
Alternatively, you can visit the PWA page (link). It’s sort of difficult to navigate, but you can eventually find links for various revisions of each file.
(My renewed interest in this was triggered by a Wired article, originally from Ars Technica, about Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, writing to the Wikimedia Foundation about ideological bias.)
You used to could buy a handheld device for offline text-only Wikipedia for under $100.
I never bought one of those but I did used to have Wikitaxi on my PC. At the time the text database for Wikipedia compiled into one file of around 2 to 4 GB, I don’t remember precisely.
It’s basically a Raspberry Pi in a nice casing. They ship by Swiss Post, so right now people in the U.S. may not be able to get it. You can also purchase (for download) a prepackaged operating system and install it on your own Raspberry Pi.
