Use Wikipedia OFFLINE!!!

Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia and many of you use it every day. But what if you don’t have internet access, it is possible to use Wikipedia offline without internet connection? Yes, it is. Here’s how.

How To Download Wikipedia For Offline Use:

Important: There are many files on the “dump” sites, the file that you need is pages-articles.xml.bz

First, grab a copy of WikiTaxi (link given below), then head over to dumps.wikimedia.org and you can download the very simple wiki, which is a great choice if you are new to Wikitaxi, because it’s so small (less than 100MB). The full Wikipedia download can be more than 100GB of data.

Downloading the actual files for offline use is not so complicated. There are many downloads available: Wikipedia is also available as localized versions for different countries. So, what you want to do now to use Wikipedia offline is to go to “simplewiki” (full links below) click on the latest version (by date!) and download the file pages-articles.xml.bz2.

• http://dumps.wikimedia.org/simplewiki/

Importing Pages-Articles.xml.bz2:

Again: Download pages-articles.xml.bz2

1. Download pages-articles.xml.bz2 file if it’s done – simplewiki file is 61MB large (bz2).
2. Extract the simplewiki-xxx-articles.xml.bz2 file
3. Open WikiTaxi_Importer.exe in WikiTaxi_1.3.0 (included in download).
4. Click on Browse and locate the XML dump file that you downloaded from simplewiki, keep in mind it has to be the articles.xml.bz2 file!
5. Enter a path to the database file that we will create. You have to enter this MANUALLY, do NOT click on browse. Simply enter something like C:/Wikidatabase/simplewiki.taxi.
6. Select how much RAM you want to use to import the database. I used 524MB, but you can use more. It will only use that RAM to create the Wikipedia database for offline use.
7. Open WikiTaxi.exe (it’s in the same folder as WikiTaxi_Importer.exe, wherever you downloaded the program to
8. Click on Options, then on Open *.taxi Database …
9. Locate the database that we created in step 5. e.g. simplewiki.taxi
10. Done!
11. You can now search for whatever you want and use Wikipedia OFFLINE! Let’s do a search for Windows 7:

NOTE: Since, wikipedia is regularly updated. So, if you too want to be updated, download the latest ‘dump’ file.

DOWNLOAD

(THANKS TO sOliver)