Offline Wikipedia Browser?

Wikipedia is mostly text. Yes, there are images too. Why isn't there some kind of local program that lets users browse the encyclopedia offline? I'll grant that it's not too much data overhead on the internet, but still. It could get monthly syncs with wikipedia archives (they let you export a .tar.gz of the whole site iirc) as updates. It could hyperlink internally, and open web browsers for external links. There'd be less telemetry all around, since everything is local. Does this exist?

Dec 12 · 3 days ago

6 Comments ↓

Kiwix is what you're looking for.

Seconded. Great application suite.

I knew about Kiwix, but not about the server.

Now I do.. And I'm "cooking" stuff for IT people. Thanks!

Nice! thanks. :)

Can websites like Brantsteele's hunger games simulator be preserved and used fully with stuff like Kiwix? I was disappointed to see Internet Archive didn't really have a functioning copy, and adding your own events and images making the dumbest character pairings was so much fun so I'd love an offline version and an opportunity to preserve it incase it's ever somehow blown off the web. I guess there's this too: https://www.nguh.org/tools/hunger_games_simulator it says the page can be downloaded and used offline, but it'd still be nice to preserve brantsteele's and some of the other simulators.

I think it depends on how much of it is dynamically generated. You can't get a Kiwix of your webmail inbox because it is all dynamically generated, for example. If it is all JavaScript on one page it should be easy as long as it doesn't need to retrieve anything to produce a result.