Monday, April 26, 2010

Downloading wikipedia

So I'm headed to Italy for vacation. Internet access is not assured, but I would like to have access to wikipedia articles on things like "Michelangelo's David" and "The Roman Empire." What to do?

It turns out that wikipedia makes all of its text not just available, but easy to download. Getting a browser for that text is a little harder, but there are some nice out-of-the-box wiki browsing apps for Windows.

Here are the parts you'd need to download and browse the full text (no pictures, unfortunately) of English wikipedia.

1. Download the compressed 5.7G wikipedia archive here: http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2

2. Get the wikiTaxi application here: http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index

I haven't actually tried this since wikiTaxi is a windows app and I'm running linux, but I've seen several favorable reviews.

Alternatively, you could try Pocket Wikipedia, a much smaller text-and-pictures version that contains many of the most popular wikipedia pages.: http://www.free-soft.ro/pocket-wikipedia/pocket-wikipedia.html.

More info on downloading from wikipedia is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database. This page is useful, but pretty technical.

1 comment:

Matt said...

I used to have a Mediawiki install running on my laptop. I wonder how long it would take to import the whole Wikipedia image . . .

Until the SD card it was on died, I had a pull of Simple Wikipedia on my Nokia N800 in sDictionary format (http://www.sdict.com/). I was using SDict Viewer (http://sdictviewer.sourceforge.net/), which was developed for Maemo but is written in Python and runs fine on my Linux install (Ubuntu 9.10).

Where in Italy are you going? I've never been to Europe, but Michelle really liked visiting San Marino when she was there with BYU track.