Download Wikipedia With Okawix To Access The Data Locally
Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopedia that is used by most users to get a quick overview on a certain topic. Wikipedia and its sister websites like Wikimedia or Wikiquotes can not only be accessed from desktop computers and web browsers but also from smartphones and other electronic devices. All have in common that an online connection is required to access the contents.
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.
Update: Okawix is no longer available on the Internet. We suggest you try a different solution like Wikipedia Offline for Chrome, or one of the suggestions in the related posts listing below.
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This is great. I’ve been looking for something like this for students.
Are there anything like this for Windows Mobile?
Dante you can check out Pocket Wikipedia. It is not entirely the same as it only offers a selection of articles
http://www.free-soft.ro/pocket-wikipedia/pocket-wikipedia.html
There is also an option to download MDict
http://www.octopus-studio.com/product.en.htm
and a Wikipedia for Mdict version at legal torrents (just enter mdict in the search interface)
http://www.legaltorrents.com/
Thanks for the followup Martin. I’ve just tried the Okawix. It’s a bear (bare?) of an interface. If you hose up on your install, the install screen does not pop back up when you activate Okawix again. I’m going to look around the web to see if I’m missing something, or I have to uninstall, wipe out the Roaming subdirectory, and than re-install in order to install updated versions of Wikipedia.
you can check out soschildrensvillages wiki compilation, you can download a copy or check the website.
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/2008-wikipedia-for-schools.htm
website : http://schools-wikipedia.org/
This is realy awesome. Thank you for such an amazing piece of information.
I have tried this out. I can download everything EXCEPT the English Wikipedia :)
Guess there’s too much traffic for that one. I’ll keep trying. At 13 gigs, I’m not too hopeful… (I have a 10mbs download speed)
Well, this is offically a BUST. Tried to download the English Wikipedia on 5 different machines with 3 different connections (fiber optics, cable, dsl); all freezes at 1.8 gig.
As it stands now, Okawix is a waste of time.
ARGH!! WARNING WARNING It’s a french software. It promptly made the rest of my system french – SURRENDERS at the first ISP request not to download too much. Now all my downloads went from 10mbs to 560k.
System restore doesn’t work. System has fully surrendered, ala french. Registry edit cleans up a bit. But the heap leak problems escalates. Now doing a full format on 5 machines.
WARNING WARNING IT’S FRENCH SOFTWARE!!!!!!!
Install only if you wish to surrender and cry at the arch.