

Did you know that it's possible to view the content of the biggest and most widely used online encyclopedia without the need for Internet connectivity? That's right, Wikipedia , with over 10 million articles in 253 languages can be viewed offline in your Linux box anytime, anywhere.

There are actually 4 easy ways to take your favorite Wikipedia offline:



1. Download Wikipedia as database XML or SQL dump

HERE

you can find the complete copy of all Wikimedia wikis, in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. A number of raw database tables in SQL form are also available.

Download or Purchase Wikipedia on DVD



This is perhaps the easiest way to get Wikipedia for offline use. However, it is currently available in English and only contains around 2,000 selected articles. --The articles were chosen based on criteria for quality and importance set by the Wikipedia community. According to Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb , larger releases in a variety of languages are coming real soon.

HERE .

Download Wikipedia on DVD

Static HTML dumps

Grab or download pages from all Wikipedia wikis in HTML format HERE



4. Pocket Wikipedia

The other easy way to take Wikipedia with you is by downloading and installing "Pocket Wikipedia". Its download size is only about 180MB but it contains hand-checked selection of Wikipedia articles the size of a fifteen volume encyclopedia with 24,000 images and 14 million words. It was first created for the PocketPC platform, but it is now available for the Linux desktop.

3.Grab or download pages from all Wikipedia wikis in HTML format. Note that the June 2008 edition dump has no image snapshot, it's just HTML. The archives are packaged as a 7-zipped tar file.4.The other easy way to take Wikipedia with you is by downloading and installing "Pocket Wikipedia". Its download size is only about 180MB but it contains hand-checked selection of Wikipedia articles the size of a fifteen volume encyclopedia with 24,000 images and 14 million words. It was first created for the PocketPC platform, but it is now available for the Linux desktop.

HERE

The download page for Pocket Wikipedia can be found

There you have it. An offline Wikipedia is indeed very handy in my case because I travel a lot in places without Internet connection.



How about you? Do you still consider an offline encyclopedia useful these days?





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