Kiwix – a cross-platform offline Wikipedia reader

Kiwix has been around for a very long time. I'm not sure what's new that's brought it back to HN. Would love to know if there's actual news.

The ZIM format it relies on has been unsupported by upstream MediaWiki and in limbo for years, as has the Collection extension that collates content for it. Wikimedia have gone through two different offline content production services (OCG, Proton) and removed ZIM support in the process, but now farm that out to a commercial service, Pediapress, that doesn't produce ZIM archives and is focused more on producing paid print copies.

While Kiwix still generates and maintains ZIM dumps of sites, the process for others to roll their own offline wiki archives is more complex, fragile, and requires the wiki to run the optional Parsoid node service (which itself has a somewhat cloudy future, as it might be ported back into PHP and integrated into the MediaWiki core).

Meanwhile, Wikimedia produces their own Android app capable of caching offline content... but hasn't supported rebuilding that app to support non-Wikimedia MediaWiki installations, since it relies on often experimental hooks developed specifically for their app, which are difficult to deploy on stock MediaWiki (and impossible on most LTS versions).

I used Kiwix - I live in London and commute via the tube network. There is patchy wifi at stations but it's not worth using.

So when commuting, kiwix is great. Often I'll be listening to a podcast and want to look up something mentioned offline.

Offline use cases seem to get forgotten. For example, Spotify offline mode is terrible and does not allow you to browse your library of downloaded tracks. Instead, you have to scroll through everything and look for those which are available offline.

I was messing around with an old version of Encarta recently, and it got me to thinking how cool it would be to have a modern encyclopedia run locally again. This lead me to Kiwix... And the 79 GB archive of English Wikipedia.

Kiwix is a great idea for places with limited / no Internet due to infrastructure or oppressive regimes, but living in the United States in a major metropolitan area, Kiwix has little use for me.

I used this when travelling in Cuba, where you can only get internet via government Wifi spots with expensive and hard to find prepaid cards. The sheer quantity and depth of Wikipedia articles made it a surprisingly good replacement for random Googling. Like when I saw a sign to Australia and thought wait, what?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia,_Cuba

Also interesting, http://aarddict.org/

I use it on my phone for offline wikipedia since it was the best thing I could find on android at the time, also reads other "dictionaries" not just wikipedia.

edit: also, you can download stackoverflow offline, but I'm not aware of a convenient UI for it. That and wikipedia are the majority of my web needs.