Wikipedia offline on a mac?

May 29, 2008 6:45 PM

How can I read Wikipedia offline on my mac (bonus points for portable and cross-platform)?

I am going on a long trip (3 months) on which I will not have internet. I want to be able to have wikipedia with me when I go. I am aware of the many options for Windows (WikiTaxi seems to be the best) but I know no good up-to-date ones for Mac. I have no real coding ability (a smidge of processing...) and want something moderately easy to use.
I have tried (and failed at using) ksana4wiki.

posted by ooklala to computers & internet (13 comments total)

I played with KiwiX / WikipediaOnDVD a bit and it was OK. It's not the whole enchilada but it's a good chunk of the useful stuff.
posted by majick at 6:51 PM on May 29

Also, I want a non-html version (unless there is a really recent version of the html that I can use).
posted by ooklala at 7:03 PM on May 29

Piggybacking, I'm really curious how to do this under *nix
posted by phrontist at 7:49 PM on May 29

Check out this page:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Download_WikiPedia

Check out the 14.1 GB file.

Good luck
posted by hal_c_on at 8:00 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

@hal_c_on
That is the unparsed XML. I need a way to view that in an easy to use, searchable environment.
posted by ooklala at 8:27 PM on May 29

how "recent" are you after? static.wikipedia.org currently has HTML of 2008-02...
posted by russm at 8:47 PM on May 29

(and in theory at least, "searchable" comes for free with Spotlight on your mac...)
posted by russm at 8:49 PM on May 29

gah! looks like static.wikipedia.org is b0rked in some way or other, and is missing dumps for languages en and upwards... never mind me...
posted by russm at 8:52 PM on May 29

This is a long shot, but there's a new version of the Wikipedia Encyclopaedia in TomeRaider format, if you don't mind spending $36 and using Windows.
posted by lukemeister at 9:11 PM on May 29

With a little bit of tweaking, you could create your own (html) mirror. From this page I found an example command line:

wget --mirror –w 10 –p --HTML-extension –-convert-links http://www.wikipedia.com

Caveats:

Make sure to do the "-w 10" part, without it your computer would give their servers a pounding. Some people might still claim that this is an unacceptable burden on their servers. I don't know, and I've never been any sort of server admin. I'm prepared for people to say that this is a terrible idea, and be right. Listen to them.

This will take a long time.

I haven't tested this, you'll have to supply the details. Here's a man page.

I'm pretty sure Macs don't ship with wget installed, you'll have to install it somehow.

posted by philomathoholic at 1:12 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

I've been wanting to do this for Wookieepedia.com (a Star Wars Wiki) FOREVER. Will WGet also snag images?

how about flash files?
posted by arniec at 7:19 AM on May 30

The wikipedia offline dump page says that they prohibit the use of downloaders like wget.
posted by ooklala at 8:59 AM on May 30

Ah, I was going to post a follow-up with a few more caveats and tips, but I guess I don't need to now. Sorry about that.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:28 AM on May 30