Downloading all of Wikipedia

Proper biology or chemistry projects usually require a lot of equipment, so today we are doing yet another tech project.

As a paranoid believer of the eventual collapse of society, I like to imagine the best possible life for someone living without national resources. I am talking cabin in the woods or bunker in the bowels of a mountain. 

But as a scientist, the loss of internet would be devastating for my quest for knowledge. Being able to search up chemical formulas or how to guides for basic survival procedures would be invaluable. This is where today’s project comes in. The Kiwix software allows you to download and read Wikipedia pages.

The procedure is fairly simple, and downloading prepared categories of pages like medical, mathematical, or grammatical is easily done as well. Today i’ll outline how to download all the wikipedia pages (without images) that are in english for a whopping 53 GB.

The first step is to go to the Kiwix website and download the Kiwix software for your operating system. The software is free but the hotspot and operating system packages, which cost money, are the first items on their homepage. Instead, follow this link; https://kiwix.org/en/applications/

*EDIT: if you have issues opening the file try downloading Kiwix Js from the Microsoft store, or whatever default app manager your OS has.

This is the software that allows you to read .zim files, which contain the juicy info we want to keep. A separate website has taken the liberty to prepare .zim files for an easy download, which is the second step: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/

 

Here you can see the website and the highlighted Wikipedia directory, which you can click on to see the following confusing mess: 

The highlighted file, named wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2024-06.zim , is all of the english (en) posts without images(nopic) as of the 6th of January 2024. 

After downloading you can put the file on an external drive or just leave it on your device to access using the initially downloaded kiwix software.

Opening the Kiwix software and going to the settings gets you the following screen:

By selecting storage and opening your zim file, the software will allow you to read the downloaded pages in a nice and organized file manager:

Thus concludes the first entry for your guide to the end of the world. I hope you enjoyed, take care.