Okawix now offers a solution to download the full Wikipedia archive (and the archives of all sister sites) to the local computer system. The software offers its own web browser that can be used to navigate the websites normally once they have been downloaded to the local hard drive. This is an excellent solution for situations where no online connection is available.

The software program displays all supported languages in its interface on the first startup. The user can then select one or multiple languages to download contents in these languages. Okawix will then display the available Wiki websites and their size. Included are Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity and Wiktionary. The size of each download ranges from a few Megabytes to astronomical 6 Gigabytes for the English Wikipedia website.

A click on the download link beneath each entry will initiate the download of that database to the local computer system.

Okawix will ask the user to select a path for the download which can be saved so that it will be automatically picked for additional downloads. Images can be downloaded optionally. This will increase the size of the download.

The main interface of Okawix will then display the downloaded Wiki websites in the left sidebar offering a search engine and web browser. There are also options to print a page and find words in the page.

Okawix provides an easy way to download Wiki websites to a local computer system. The integrated web browser is responsive enough to offer a great offline working experience. It would be nice if the developers would add an option to automatically update the downloaded contents with new content that has been added to Wiki websites. Okawix is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

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Deletionpedia provides a mirror of these deleted pages so that they can still be accessed by interested users. The website offers for example pages like “2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks”, “Elvis Sightings” or a “list of female basketball players”. Searching for some of the phrases on Wikipedia will lead the visitor to a more general page that covers the topic. A search for “Blood Angels” will for example open the Space Marines (Warhammer 40,000) on Wikipedia while Deletionpedia still offers the original Blood Angels Wikipedia entry.

Most Deletionpedia pages contain links to the deletion discussion on Wikipedia which can shed some light on the deletion motives. Some pages contain additional information that the page is going to be transferred to another Wiki in the future.

Deletionpedia is an interesting project that currently hosts more than 60.000 Wikipedia pages that have been deleted. Interested users can browse Deletionpedia by various parameters including date of deletion, by number of revisions or editors.

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The entry PHP will for instance display part of the Wikipedia article on the top of the results. A Youtube video will be shown on the right with the option to browse through all Youtube videos that are related to the search term.

Below that is probably the most interesting part of Visual Wikipedia: Related Terms. Related terms are terms that are related to the entered search term. They are shown as a tag cloud and mindmap. A click on a tag or an entry in the mindmap will load search for that term on Visual Wikipedia.

A box will all outgoing links of the Wikipedia article, recommended articles and links to different language versions is shown on the very same page as well.

Links to various external search engines are available at the bottom of the page. This includes links to Youtube, Wikipedia, Google or Flickr among others.

The main benefit of using Visual Wikipedia as opposed to the normal Wikipedia website is the additional display of information on the result pages.

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The software program provides a great way of accessing Wikipedia offline. Even the English Wikipedia articles, which are the largest in size, fit on less than 8 Gigabyte of space meaning they can easily fit on USB drives, desktop computers and notebooks.

The only aspect that is not integrated are the images of the articles which would raise the size of the offline archive tremendously.

After downloading one of the article backups from Wikipedia and downloading & installing the WikiTaxi software the backups can be imported into the application. Here is the link to the English backup of Wikipedia, probably the one that most of my readers would want to download.

The importer can be started by clicking on the file WikiTaxi_Importer.exe; Just select the downloaded backup and a name for the converted file. It’s also possible to assign additional RAM for the process. (it did not seem to have a positive effect though) It took more than 45 minutes to convert the English article directory of Wikipedia on my computer.

Once the import has finished the newly created article index can be loaded into the main application. This can also be done automatically with the command WikiTaxi.exe path-to-taxi-file. That file had roughly twice the size of the backup that was downloaded from Wikipedia.

The interface reminds of a basic browser. Just enter a phrase in the search field to load articles about the subject. All internal links are clickable as long as they point to other articles of the same index.

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The only disadvantage that I can think of is that you will not use the latest version on their website and that you have to update the database to keep up to date. The English database file has a size of more than 3 Gigabytes – packed that is – and it can take some time to download it depending on your Internet connection.

I did use a download manager to make sure that the download does not get interrupted and I have to start over again. Here is the list of files that you do need, I walk you through the installation afterwards:

• Wikipedia Database Snapshot – the file needed is currently called enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
• An Apache server. I did use the free XAMPP to install it on my Windows system.
• Wikifilter – the script that makes Wikipedia available in the Apache server.

I suggest you start by downloading the files needed. The Wikipedia database download will naturally take longer than the other two downloads which is excellent for our purpose. Once XAMPP has been downloaded install it. You are asked if you want to add services to your system during installation, this is not needed. Make sure you start the XAMPP control panel afterwards.

Keep this open and wait for the downloads to finish. Now unpack the file that contains the Wikipedia articles and wait for it to finish. The unpacked file has a size of more than 13 Gigabytes so make sure you have enough free hard drive space on that drive.
Now add the date of the release in the format YYYYMMDD to the file name. I added it at the end before the .xml.

Now run WikiIndex.exe and drag and drop the XML file in the program window. It starts indexing the database file which should take a while as well (5 minutes on my system). We are almost done now.

You need to locate the httpd.conf file in the XAMPP directory and add an entry to it. The file is located in xampp\apache\conf. Just open it with a normal text editor and add the following line at the end:

LoadModule WikiFilter_module “C:/Program Files/WikiFilter/WikiFilter.so”

Please replace the path to the WikiFilter.so file with the path on your system. You should also note that the file path uses “/” instead of the usual “\” to separate directories.

Start Apache using the XAMPP control panel and point your browser to the url http://localhost/wiki/.

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I was able to spot a distribution called Schools Wikipedia however that offered parts of Wikipedia for schools as CD and DVD image. The only difference between both distributions is the lack of full sized images in the CD version. The CD version can be downloaded directly from the projects website while the DVD version is supplied via Bittorrent.

All submitted articles then went through a clean-up script to remove Fair Use images, all sentences whose only purpose was to link to unincluded articles (e.g. “see also”), stubs and editorial content, and sections containing material unsuitable for children and external links. Where articles had been vandalised or contained questionable material the most recent good version was used. The resulting 2007 Selection is browsable at http://schools-wikipedia.org and was fixed in terms of article selection on 17 May 2007

This is not the complete archive but it’s the only release currently available that has been processed. The only other way of obtaining a complete copy of Wikipedia is to download the XML database and create the pages either dynamically or static using that database file.

If you want to give this a go I can recommend WikiFilter which is both a text parser and web filter. You need a XML database file, and an Apache or Windows server for it.

Since this is something that most users will have troubles with I suggest to download the Schools Wikipedia instead of if you want a local copy. You can browse the contents here.

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