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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

This article reminded me that many years ago I used to make PDF compilations of related Wikipedia articles using some tooling developed by PediaPress, and then read those offline on my laptop or iPad. I recently encountered one such compilation of cryptography & security related articles in my EBooks folder, and noticed the PediaPress metadata on the PDF. Apparently PediaPress is still around, and its tooling is still open source:

https://pediapress.com/code/

I also Google'd around a bit on this topic and it looks like there is an alternative set of tooling, wiki2book, focused on doing the same thing, but generating EPUBs that look good on e-reader devices. It also smartly doesn't require a modified/extended MediaWiki server, handling the quirks of the live Wikipedia instance specifically. Here is the info on that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/189qqxe/wiki2boo...

https://github.com/hauke96/wiki2book

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I used to take advantage of the browser's "work offline" functionality. This started to work less and less reliably, even by the early 2000s, but Wikipedia still worked nicely. I would dial up at night when everyone was asleep and click through to all the pages surrounding some topic, like internal combustion engines. Then the next day I'd work offline and digest it all. I was sad when I clicked a link that hadn't been cached, but somehow having only the limited amount available meant I actually did read it all. Nowadays it's all available and lots of people don't seem to read anything ever. Sigh...

There is an app for Android called Kiwix that lets you download the whole of Wikipedia for viewing offline. I keep meaning to do it but never got around to it, though.

On Android, the official Wikipedia app is surprisingly good at marking articles for offline reading, organizing them into collections, and downloading them, including related assets like images. When I'm traveling I install the app on my "travel phone" (which is Android / Google Fi) and take advantage of it along with Kindle app offline reading for Lonely Planet guides, and the Google Maps offline maps feature.

+1.

Good tips.

I can absolutely recommend osmand+ (Android) or maps.me (iPhone) for OpenStreetMap offline data. Streets better than Google maps ;)

Instead of maps.me I suggest to use https://organicmaps.app/, the privacy-respecting fork, since maps.me was sold to a payment processor. OrganicMaps is a fork from the original founders.

Keep in mind that offline Google Maps expire. If you want something that is guaranteed to work indefinitely, use OsmAnd+.

Try Kiwix. It's an offline reader, you can download the entire English-language Wikipedia, complete with media, in about 100GB. They also have a bunch of other collections like Project Gutenberg. There are also less heavy subsets.

https://kiwix.org/en/

+1.

I need to try this.

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