Although in these times we live practically permanently connected to the Internet, sometimes we can be cut off and need to access some tool offline, such as Wikipedia , which has become the most consulted encyclopedia on the planet.
Those who are older may remember that in the old days we had encyclopedias in physical format, with Encarta being the leader of that time. That was precisely the initial intention of the creator of Kiwix, Emmanuel Engelhart , in 2003 after several failed attempts to publish a Wikipedia on CD-ROM and that is what he has ended up achieving with this application: access it anytime you want, even without network connectivity.
Kiwix operation and utilities
Kiwix is a non-profit application. All code is free and open source under GPL3 license. It is available for download on a variety of platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, as a Chromium and Raspberry Pi browser extension.
Kiwix and Wikipedia logos.
It allows you to make highly compressed copies of entire websites in a single file with a “.zim” extension. These compressed files are small enough to be saved on mobile devices, computers, a flash drive, or a microSD card. These ZIM files even preserve the same texts, images and videos as the original material.
Although its massive use is related to the backup of Wikipedia, it can also do the same with other similar web portals based on Wikimedia. In fact, Kiwix is officially supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and even has its own entry in the collaborative encyclopedia.
Among these additional functionalities, we can find the possibility of reading books from Project Gutenberg (a library of more than 60,000 free electronic books from books that already exist physically and have been free of rights), watch TED talks or consult Stack Exchange, a web network of questions and answers on different topics.
How to download the entire Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can access and edit, is one of the most visited websites in the world. In the event that you want to download its extensive database of entries, there are a series of steps to follow to download the ZIM of the content you want to have in Kiwix.
When you run Kiwix for the first time, it will prompt you to download the remote catalog of available file repositories . Once this is done, the contents of the catalog will be displayed. Once we have the entire database available, we can search for the content we want, in this case Wikipedia using filters such as language and press download to obtain the ZIM file.
View of Wikipedia in Kiwix
Once the ZIM file is downloaded from Wikipedia (same for any other type of Wikimedia project), it is added directly to the catalog available in the My Library tab in the sidebar within Kiwix.
There we will have that backup with all the Wikipedia articles indexed at the time of the creation of the last ZIM file to access them even offline. The high volume of the collaborative encyclopedia can exceed 16 GB in size in Spanish.
As we said before, a mobile app is also available on iOS and Android to access from your mobile phone in case you are going to travel to a rural location or remote enough to not have stable connectivity, which even allows you to activate a server mode to allow other devices to connect to your copy of Wikipedia offline on the local network.
