If you have enough disk space, it’s possible to download Wikipedia in its entirety. And an app called XOWA makes the process easy.
As How-To Geek points out, there are a handful of reasons you might want to download Wikipedia. Maybe you want your kids to be able to use it for research without allowing them online. Maybe you want to turn your laptop into an encyclopedia that you can use even if you’re offline. Whatever your reason, XOWA is a free, open-source app that makes it possible.
You’ll need to have Java installed, but it works with any system. Once you download the files you need from XOWA’s download page and run the application, you’ll see the main page. From here, head to Tools > Download Central. From Download Central, you can pick and choose different options, like which Wiki versions you want, what language you want to save everything in and whether or not you want images.
Obviously, depending on your options, your downloads could take up quite a bit of space:
If you just want to download the simple version of Wikipedia, which consists of a little under 122,000 articles, then it will occupy just over 420 MB of drive space. If you add in images, that’s another 2 GB. The full English version of Wikipedia will set you back a whopping 45 GB while adding images will account for another 99 GB, so that’s almost 150 GB of drive space when all is downloaded and installed.
Once you’ve completed the process, though, you’ll have access to Wikipedia from anywhere. You can even download to your Android device. Head to How-To Geek’s full post for more info.
XOWA via How-To Geek
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