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Comment by splatzone | Hacker News Reader

What's the main target market for this kind of thing?

Perhaps not the main market, but prisons.

Since March 2013, inmates of the Bellevue prison in Gorgier, Switzerland can request access to an uncensored offline copy of the French Wikipedia, based on the Kiwix software. Internet access is severely restricted for the prisoners, most of whom serve long-term sentences [1]

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_June_20...

I personally use it for traveling. There are a few other applications as well:

- low-bandwidth availability, particularly in less-developed regions of the world

- censorship evasion

- security concerns. some users want to access Wikipedia without exposing their machine to the internet

There are probably a few others I'm missing....

"censorship evasion..."

Unfortunately, having your own copy of Wikipedia could also be used to enable censorship. For example, a fundamentalist school could have their own version of Wikipedia from which they've purged all articles about evolution, etc. Then they could configure their firewall to block the real Wikipedia.

Agreed. However, I think it would be less work for them to block access through firewall policy, than to remove them from XOWA.

By and large, for most private individuals, an offline app would allow them to evade censorship. I'd hope that this benefit outweighs the risk of the other's abuse.

A firewall would not hide the fact that censoring takes place. You would have to rewrite content to do that. That might be easier in batch, especially if you are going to do NLP to make cut up sentences grammatical.

Ahh.... That's pretty devious. I was thinking of blocking the entire article, not rewriting content. Still not worth the work IMHO, but who knows what censorship servants would do.

One interesting case I can think of is for institutions which for some reason or another want complete control over article creation/deletion/modification but without the need for recreating the entire knowledge database from scratch.

Schools without internet access; unfortunately those are still millions.

Machine Learning

People living in very remote areas, with no phone/net access like some outback parts of Australia.

Collectors.

Tech Camps like railscamps.org which often don't have internet access.

Zombie invasion fanatics, for when the zombies invade you still have an archive of knowledge.

This is only part of why my local file server has a recent wikipedia dump.

Accidental time travel?

Accidental time travel of my entire house, yes. I really should copy it over to my laptop, as that's a fair bit more likely to be useful if I end up in the past without a source of electricity.

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