Software’s to download contents of Wikipedia
It is possible to download the whole Wikipedia contents on the user’s computer or mobile phone for offline reading. Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia, which provides database dumps of all their Wikis, so that the user can download the contents for free. Database dumps are mainly used for backing up the Database or the contents. People can access the entire Wikipedia content on their computer or mobile phones, even when there is no net connection.
Every single article on Wikipedia website is updated frequently. The dumps are available as .xml.bz2 files, which can be easily opened on any system using free and portable software called WikiTaxi. Wikitaxi will un-compress the Wikipedia files (.bz2) and then they can convert them into .taxi file format. Now the user can open the .taxi file formats inside WikiTaxi as if they open .doc files in Microsoft word.
Kiwix is a best alternative to Wikitaxi, which is also free software, available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems. First the user has to install Kiwix software on their system, and download any Wikipedia editions. The downloaded article is in .zim files, which can open directly in Kiwix, without doing any conversion. The latest .zim packages for various editions of Wikipedia can be downloaded using Download Manager or Bit torrent from kiwix.org. This is a 9.7GB full text file, with no images.
Kiwix is more user friendly than WikiTaxi because the .zim files of Kiwix can be read across all platform. But the main disadvantage of Kiwix is, unlike the Database dumps by WikiTaxi, the .zim files of Kiwix are not frequently updated.
ADVANTAGES
The advantages are listed below
- If the user is having an iOS device like iPhone, iPad or Ipad touch, then they can use the WikiOffline application and they can carry the entire Wikipedia articles in your pocket.
- The Wikipedia articles are rendered in a beautiful interface and they support tabbed browsing, so that the user can open multiple articles at a time.
- WikiReader is a 3.5” monochrome device, with touch screen which contains over 3million articles.
- WikiReader can be updated by connecting it with the system or by receiving updates on SD cards. The cost of Wikireader is $99.
