The latest option has been exclusively designed for the Google Chrome web browser and therefor also Google’s Chromebook. The web application allows you to download nearly all textual contents from Wikipedia to make them available directly in the Chrome browser.

You are asked to either pick a 13 Megabyte dump of the most popular Wikipedia articles or the big database which weights in at about 1 Gigabyte. You can also select one of four available parsers which turn the Wikipedia information into HTML contents that are readable in the web browser.

Especially the large download make take a while, and you also need to make sure that you have enough disk space available for it.

Once installed you can use the following page to access your Wikipedia information offline in the Chrome browser. The developer suggests to bookmark the page for fast access.

It offers a search option, access to the program settings, access to the article index and an option to load a random article from the repository.

The search supports suggestions which are displayed automatically once you start typing in the first letter of your search term.

The articles are complete with the exception of media and the footnotes which are not displayed at all.

Search results are displayed almost instantly on modern computer systems.

Chrome users who would like their own personal Wikipedia copy on their computer can download and install the web app from the official Chrome web store. (via Chromestory)

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.

via Instant Fundas

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.