Kiwix is available as a native application for Android, Linux, Mac OS, iOS and Windows operating systems. It is also available as Chrome, Firefox and Edge extensions. Content files can be downloaded from the apps or from the library.
Kiwix is a software suite allowing you to enjoy content offline. No access to Internet required! But before using Kiwix, you need to download it in accordance to your future usage and your operating system. Then, you will have to choose the content you want via the Kiwix library or from here.
Kiwix Mac Download
Kiwix JS is a light and highly portable application focusing on mobile devices. You can install it from the Microsoft app store or download directly the installer file. Kiwix JS supports Windows 10 on any device: x64, x86 and ARM. ZIM archives can be downloaded in the app.
Kiwix for Apple Mac OS X is provided as DMG file. You simply need to download it, mount the DMG image and copy/install Kiwix to the Applications folder. So far, there is no portable (directly usable on a USB flash drive for example) version of Kiwix for Apple Mac OS X.
Kiwix for Android is a version of Kiwix for all Android based mobile devices. It provides an easy way to enjoy Wikipedia and other ZIM files on all Android4+ devices. This app has a perfect Android look and feel and is extremely fast. Give it a try on Play Store or download directly the APK file.
You can download the ZIM file (or files) directly using the Kiwix App, but this may take a long time and is error prone. A faster and more reliable method is to use a computer to download the ZIM file from this web site then transfer the ZIM file to your device using iTunes File Sharing.
Unpack the downloaded file and run the "kiwix" program. If you have a 64 bit x86 system and try to run the 32 bit version of Kiwix, check that you have the multi arch support installed on your computer.
Kiwix can run on almost every operating system. But, we don't provide pre-compiled binaries for all of them. If you are interested in running Kiwix on an operating system which does not already have pre-compiled binaries, you may download Kiwix source code and compile Kiwix on your own.
Kiwix is a Mac program that provides you with a solution when you need to access info from the Wikipedia website and you don't have an Internet connection. The application allows you to download libraries containing certain categories of information from Wikipedia and access them when you don't have access to the Internet or you're dealing with a low connection signal.
Images and other uploaded media are available from mirrors in addition to being served directly from Wikimedia servers. Bulk download is (as of September 2013) available from mirrors but not offered directly from Wikimedia servers. See the list of current mirrors. You should rsync from the mirror, then fill in the missing images from upload.wikimedia.org; when downloading from upload.wikimedia.org you should throttle yourself to 1 cache miss per second (you can check headers on a response to see if was a hit or miss and then back off when you get a miss) and you shouldn't use more than one or two simultaneous HTTP connections. In any case, make sure you have an accurate user agent string with contact info (email address) so ops can contact you if there's an issue. You should be getting checksums from the mediawiki API and verifying them. The API Etiquette page contains some guidelines, although not all of them apply (for example, because upload.wikimedia.org isn't MediaWiki, there is no maxlag parameter).
Unlike most article text, images are not necessarily licensed under the GFDL & CC-BY-SA-3.0. They may be under one of many free licenses, in the public domain, believed to be fair use, or even copyright infringements (which should be deleted). In particular, use of fair use images outside the context of Wikipedia or similar works may be illegal. Images under most licenses require a credit, and possibly other attached copyright information. This information is included in image description pages, which are part of the text dumps available from dumps.wikimedia.org. In conclusion, download these images at your own risk (Legal)
Before starting a download of a large file, check the storage device to ensure its file system can support files of such a large size, and check the amount of free space to ensure that it can hold the downloaded file.
It is useful to check the MD5 sums (provided in a file in the download directory) to make sure the download was complete and accurate. This can be checked by running the "md5sum" command on the files downloaded. Given their sizes, this may take some time to calculate. Due to the technical details of how files are stored, file sizes may be reported differently on different filesystems, and so are not necessarily reliable. Also, corruption may have occurred during the download, though this is unlikely.
If you plan to download Wikipedia Dump files to one computer and use an external USB flash drive or hard drive to copy them to other computers, then you will run into the 4 GB FAT32 file size limit. To work around this limit, reformat the >4 GB USB drive to a file system that supports larger file sizes. If working exclusively with Windows computers, then reformat the USB drive to NTFS file system.
If you seem to be hitting the 2 GB limit, try using wget version 1.10 or greater, cURL version 7.11.1-1 or greater, or a recent version of lynx (using -dump). Also, you can resume downloads (for example wget -c).
As part of Wikimedia Enterprise a partial mirror of HTML dumps is made public. Dumps are produced for a specific set of namespaces and wikis, and then made available for public download. Each dump output file consists of a tar.gz archive which, when uncompressed and untarred, contains one file, with a single line per article, in json format. This is currently an experimental service.
XOWA is a free, open-source application that helps download Wikipedia to a computer. Access all of Wikipedia offline, without an internet connection!It is currently in the beta stage of development, but is functional. It is available for download here.
MzReader by Mun206 works with (though is not affiliated with) BzReader, and allows further rendering of wikicode into better HTML, including an interpretation of the monobook skin. It aims to make pages more readable. Requires Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime, which is not supplied with the download. Also requires Inet Control and Internet Controls (Internet Explorer 6 ActiveX), which are packaged with the download.
WP-MIRROR is a free utility for mirroring any desired set of WMF wikis. That is, it builds a wiki farm that the user can browse locally. WP-MIRROR builds a complete mirror with original size media files. WP-MIRROR is available for download.
In 2012, Kiwix received a grant from Wikimedia France to build a kiwix-plug, which was deployed to universities in eleven countries known as the Afripedia Project.[12][13] In February 2013 Kiwix won SourceForge's Project of the Month award[14] and an Open Source Award in 2015.[15]
Users first download Kiwix, then download content for offline viewing with Kiwix. Compression saves disk space and bandwidth. All of English-language Wikipedia, with pictures, fits on a large USB stick or external media (87 GB as of December 2021, or 47 GB with no pictures).[14][16]
There is an HTTP server version called kiwix-serve; this allows a computer to host Kiwix content, and make it available to other computers on a network.[17] The other computers see an ordinary website. Kiwix-hotspot is an HTTP server version for plug computers,[14] which is often used to provide a Wi-Fi server.[18]
Since 2014, most Wikipedia versions are available for download in various different languages.[16] For English Wikipedia, a full version containing pictures as well as an alternative version containing text only can be downloaded from the archive. The servers are updated every two to ten months, depending on the size of the file. For English Wikipedia, the update frequency is thus substantially lower than the bzip2 database downloads by the Wikimedia Foundation, which are updated twice a month.[21][circular reference]
Besides public domain content, works licensed under a Creative Commons license are available for download as well. For example, offline versions of the Ubuntu wiki containing user documentation for the Ubuntu operating system,[25] ZIM editions of TED conference talks[26] and videos from Crash Course are available in the Kiwix archive as ZIM file formats.[27]
Kiwix is a light program that will require less space than most software in the Education & Reference section. It's a software frequently downloaded in countries like India, Ethiopia, and Bosnia And Herzegovina.
There are a couple of ways you could do this, and I'll be showing you how to do it with ZIM files via Kiwix (Mac, Windows, Linux), by downloading XML files directly from Wikipedia, and reading XML files with WikiTaxi (Windows).
Kiwix is an offline reader that allows you to download the entire Wikipedia library (over 9 gigabytes) as seen in January 2012. Since that's a lot of content, there are no photos included. If you're looking for pictures too, you can get a smaller (and older) backup with files dating from 2010 and earlier, though, that's only 45,000 pages.
NOTE: I chose Mac, but if you're using Windows, you can also skip the above download and go straight to downloading one of the portable pre-indexed ZIMs, which already includes the Wikipedia database of your choice and makes searching for articles easier right off the bat.
Again, if you have Windows and chose to install one of the portable pre-indexed ZIM files, you're good to go already. If not, you'll have to download the Wikipedia library you want. If you scroll down the help page in Kiwix, you can find the download links for the different libraries and languages that Wikipedia has to offer. Alternatively, you can download the ZIM files right from Kiwix's website. 2ff7e9595c
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