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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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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