Wikipedia has taken the place of the encyclopedia and is the most common reference book for teachers, students and anyone else who enjoys researching nearly any topic online. While many people have the internet, there are those who don’t, and even if they do, having Wikipedia right on your desktop is a great convenience, especially if the internet goes down.
How To Download Wikipedia Articles for Offline Reading
Wikipedia is available to users as a download that makes it accessible offline by an installation process. With a variety of tools available to download dump pages of Wikipedia, not just in the English language, but others as well, Wikipedia can be accessed on nearly any computer, whether it is a Windows or Microsoft computer based system or a Mac or Linux computer system. Here are some of the software programs available for downloading Wikipedia for offline accessibility:
Zipedia: If you have a Windows computer operating system you can use Zipedia to access Wikipedia offline as a Mozilla Firefox plug in. Just install the Zipedia plug in and download Wikipedia dump pages on your hard drive.
Wiki Taxi is another tool available for downloading Wikipedia offline. This free software program converts Wikipedia into a .xml.bzz file which is then converted into a taxi file. Every file on Wikipedia is saved on your hard drive or on a disk by downloading the WikiTaxi software.
Wiki Offline: Because many people have Mac and Apple computers, Wikipedia can also be accessed without use of the internet. Just download a tool called Wiki Offline by visiting the Mac App Store and follow the instructions for downloading.
Media Wiki: For Linux, Windows and the Pocket PC, the Pocket Wikipedia was developed by Schools Wikipedia and can easily download 15 volumes of the encyclopedia. Another great tool for downloading Wikipedia dump pages is called the MediaWiki, which is available for Linux and Apache users. This tool is also available for those who have MySQL or PHP operating systems. MediaWiki is easy to download to a disk and can be found by downloading WAMP, then installing MediWiki. The most recent version of Wikipedia dump pages is the the 2008 version and it can be decompressed and saved in a 7-Zip file.
WikiTaxi: This is is a portable application that enables you to search, read and browse wikipedia offline, you do not need an internet connection to use wikitaxi and all it’s pages are stored on a wiki database, this application comes WikiTaxi with an importer that will de-compress the Wikipedia database files in (.bz2) and converts them into a .taxi file, it is multilingual, so you can use it for several language Wikipedias, it uses Wikipedia database dumps that are usually updated every few weeks so you can also update yours to make sure everything is ok.
Kiwix: This is a very cool alternative to WikiTaxi, it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users, some of it’s features include, ZIM file Index capacity, ability to make search suggestions, tabs navigation, PDF/HTML export, it’s also localised in more than 80 languages, you can download the latest .zim package from kiwix.org
While it is easier to use Kiwix than to use WikiTaxi but unlike the database dumps used by WikiTaxi, the .zim files from Kiwix are not updated as frequently as the ones from WikiTaxi .
Wikipedia is the main reference source on the internet, with information on nearly any topic you can think of. Geographical statistics, biographies, health and educational information and many other topics are available when browsing Wikipedia. Since it’s availability is ready-made, many users enjoy having it installed on their desktop or downloaded on a disk. With a variety of tools available for downloading Wikipedia, it is now easier than ever to have access to this huge online encyclopedia for offline reading. It is now available for those who have smart phones, iPads, and also PC’s at home. Wikipedia can be enjoyed by anyone, anywhere, anytime of the day or night, both offline or on the internet.
Tags: Download Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikipedia Download, WikiTaxi, ZipediaSource : techtalkafrica[dot]com
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