How to store the entire Wikipedia (well almost) inside your Smartphone or Tablet

How would you like to have the entire Wikipedia text inside your android smartphone? What do you say to that? I'd say "Information is POWER!".

Never mind that it's fully text-only with not a single image in sight. Imagine reading two million articles on famous persons, history, technology, etc. on Wikipedia, but totally, get this, OFFLINE. Access the articles, anytime, anywhere, without WiFi.

Welcome to BitMagic Technologies LLP's Wiki Encyclopedia Offline-Free app!

We're talking here about a whopping 3.58 Gigabytes of download data for your cherished smartphone or tablet. Zounds! A long wait indeed, depending on your Internet speed, but it's well worth the wait.

In fact, I can't wait for the day when a smartphone or tablet has the storage capacity exceeding 250 Gigabytes - which is how much storage space a full version of an offline Wikipedia, containing text and images, will take up.

Einstein would have been proud of you!

2 million articles at your fingertips.

My one gripe is that the app doesn't allow text-to-speech capability. So my Ivona Amy or Nicole TTS Engine can't read the text while I'm driving or ironing my shirt. Maybe in the next update then.

A smartphone is too smart and expensive a device to use it just to play games. Life is too precious to while the time away with all kinds of distractions on your smartphone. Want to be a winner at Jeopardy? Why not enlargen your world and knowledge by browsing 20 Wikipedia offline articles a day? It'll only take you 273 years to finish the two million articles of 2013 Wikipedia! So why not Wikipedia-fy your smartphone and tablet today? You won't regret it.

Happy Wikipedia-ing
Frankie Kam

P.S.,
Incidentally, my first blog post on Moodurian.blogspot.com was entitled "How to fit the entire Wikipedia inside your laptop" was in May 2010. How times have changed. Amazing.

How to fit the whole Wikipedia inside your Laptop

Now that's 3,800,000 webpages in printed form!

What wikipedia would look like if all its pages were to be printed. Be careful not to drop it on someone, okay?

METHOD 1: Using WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/)

1.1. Download all 5.7 Gigabytes of the latest Wikipedia English webpages http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2


This is the latest Wikipedia dump file (2010-Mar-16 08:44:40). If you want this file without having to download it for 5 to 8 hours, please get it from Mr Frankie (frankie@stamford.edu.my), who will be most happy to give to you for a fee of RM0.00.

1.2. Download the offline browser WikiTaxi at:
http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index
(look for the download link on the left)

1.3. Run the WikiTaxi importer executable file.
Browse for the bz2 file; specify the output file directory and filename (for example dewiki.taxi). Now go and take a long teh-tarik break, around 2 hours or more (!!!) as WikiTaxi extracts the contents of the bz2 file and then recompresses them into your output filename.

1.4. After your long coffee break, start WikiTaxi.exe, and open a database.
WikiTaxi will display a random page and you can start browsing from here.

You can copy your wikitaxi files and dewiki.taxi (which will be a few Gigabytes, but still small enough to fit in your 16 Gigabyte thumbdrive) and carry it around. You could, of course, also copy these files to your laptop's or desktop's harddisk. Here's my output file after 2.5 hours of conversion by wikitaxi:

Sorry, as of Wikipedia's dump file, dated November 2009, the resultant *.taxi file is greater than 8 gigabyte. So you can't fit it inside a thumbdrive, unless you have a 16Gb thumbdrive. For the latest Wikipedia dated April 2010, the resultant *taxi file will be even larger in size.

After every few months (or is it weeks?!), you could repeat the whole process as Wikipedia gets updated, like, every hour. Just be prepared to take many long teh-tarik breaks!

Here's WikiTaxi in action. I did a search for "Ananda Krishnan" and got this screen:

There are, however, some drawbacks to WikiIndex1. No images (a pity, since illustrations, images and pictures on Wikipedia are excellent memory-aids and are part of the learning process)
2. WikiTaxi's client program (the one that runs on your PC/laptop) doesn't allow copy and paste - this I find very strange.


METHOD 2: Using Okawix (http://www.okawix.com)

Okawix lets you download the whole content of Wikipedia, with or without images, so that you can browse it offline: Okawix is available in 253 languages and includes sister projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks)

After downloading and installing the software, click on the home icon (the red-roofed house icon, next to magnifying glass), and you will be presented with a menu of Wikis to download. Half of them entail downloads of more than a 100 Megabytes (the English Wikipedia is 6 Gigabytes!).

o far, I have managed to download WikiNews data and images (120 Megabytes). I haven't yet managed to download 6 Gigabytes worth of the English Wikipedia via this free open source software. If Okawix manages to download that, the resultant data must be very, very huge. The only way to do this is to do an overnight (weekend) download! That's my next project, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I will have to do with just the full html-only Wikipedia via WikiTaxi.

Lastly, I leave you with a screenshot of WikiNews data in the Okawix client on my laptop. Notice that it comes with images.

Last Words
If any student or staff is interested to fit the whole wikipedia inside your thumbdrive and browse Wikipedia offline, feel free to contact me: Frankie Kam, frankie@stamford.edu.my, boonsengkam@gmail.com, telephone: 6012-6585109, 606-2822613.



REFERENCES
For more information, head over to:
http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index

http://www.aboutonlinetips.com/download-wikipedia-on-computer-for-offline-access/