Download And Use Wikipedia Offline With Firefox

Zipedia (via Instant Fundas) is actually the second (Wikipedia Taxi was the first) application that downloads Wikipedia and provides offline access to it’s contents. The main difference between Wikipedia Taxi and Zipedia is that the latter is a Firefox add-on which adds the Wikipedia offline search right into Firefox. The contents of Wikipedia can then be accessed by typing in wikipedia://wiki/ into the address bar. A keyword could probably help to reduce the address further.

The main benefit of this approach is that you can search Wikipedia while being offline. Other uses could be due to slow Internet connections or if Wikipedia is banned in the network.

The first step is the usual download of the Wikipedia articles. You can select any language version you like from the Wikipedia Dump. The import is started in the options of the add-on which also contains a download link to a recommended Wikipedia backup which has a size of more than 7 Gigabytes. Yes, the download can take a while unless you pick a different article backup. It’s also important to have enough space on the hard drive for the download.

Zipedia imports the Wikipedia download after downloading it which puts some strain on the system and takes a while as well. After that Wikipedia can be browsed by entering the address mentioned above in the Firefox address bar.

Images can’t be browsed and the search is only searching the titles of the articles and not the articles themselves which is a bit disappointing.

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Tags: firefox, firefox-add on, wikipedia, wikipedia download, wikipedia offline, zipedia
Categories: firefox

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9 Responses to “Download And Use Wikipedia Offline With Firefox”

1. Howard says:

   August 11, 2008 at 3:35 am

   There is another of taking WikiPedia offline using Firefox and GreaseMonkey. It also makes use of the Gears plugin for
   Firefox 3.0

   Instructions are available here: http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81101&topic=11982

   Links:

   http://www.greasespot.net
   http://gears.google.com
2. mutheiwana says:

   October 9, 2008 at 1:49 pm

   i like wikipedia
3. p kar says:

   February 8, 2009 at 2:34 pm

   it’s really gr8
4. frank says:

   June 22, 2009 at 3:38 am

   i need wikipedia please

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

1. Zipedia, la Wikipedia contigo en cualquier parte says:

   August 7, 2008 at 10:19 am

   [...] | GHacks Descarga | Zipedia trackback ¿Recomendarías este post? Más noticias sobre: Windows, [...]
2. Good Reads in the Blogosphere says:

   August 8, 2008 at 10:09 am

   [...] Download And Use Wikipedia Offline With Firefox from gHacks [...]
3. Wikipedia offline con firefox says:

   August 8, 2008 at 8:56 pm

   [...] Visto en Ghacks [...]
4. Zipedia: Wikipedia Sin Conexión A Internet - demos y programas gratis para descargar says:

   August 15, 2008 at 8:13 am

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5. Offline Wikipedia « Tinder Blog says:

   November 21, 2008 at 6:52 pm

   [...] Zipedia is a Firefox plugin which loads and indexes a Wikipedia dump file. It requires a different dump file, containing the latest metadata (8 GB) instead of the usual one (3 GB). You can then access Wikipedia offline in your browser by going to a URL such as wikipedia://wiki. It does not support images, and the search feature only searches article titles, not their contents. You can pass the indexed data between users as a Zip file to save time and bandwidth, and you may be able to share this file between multiple users on a computer or a network. (thanks Ghacks.net) [...]