Wikipedia At Home

Both Pica and I had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home when we grew up, always at hand to dig into some topic of interest. Nowadays Wikipedia plays that role, the jewel of the Internet, a master reference only one bit of typing away. But what if…something happen to the Internet? A tech enclosure movement or collapse of the root level domain name system or rampant cyberwarfare?

It turns out one can download all of Wikipedia pretty easily. Since 2007 there has been a project called Kiwix that has created a system for taking extremely large knowledge stores and compressing them into single files that are easily viewed with special software offline.

This software is not difficult to run and is available for all major platforms. Their catalog lists 3458 different works that have been compiled into this file format in many different languages. I’ve had a go and have downloaded the complete English Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and resources from iFixit. The Wikipedia file is 115 GB in size and took several hours to download.

It’s a comfort having Wikipedia on my own hard drive. You never know.