Virtually all the knowledge of civilization seems to be concentrated today in Wikipedia, a worthy successor to the “Encyclopédie” that the enlightened Frenchmen Diderot and D’alembert. The great advantage is that instead of thick volumes of complicated updating in the case of Wikipedia, it is enough to connect to the Internet from any device to access its unfathomable amount of information.
Wikipedia can be downloaded in full or only the desired article(s)
This advantage, however, also has a drawback, and that is not being able to access such content if you do not have an Internet connection, but fortunately there is a solution: download Wikipedia. And with two options: full download or just the desired article.
The latter option may be the most advisable if you want to save for later consultation of certain data or to read more calmly, in the case of particularly extensive or prolix articles. It is very easy to achieve this since, once you have located the Wikipedia article you are interested in, all you have to do is select the option “Print/Export – Download as PDF” in the left-hand column of the web page.
The result is that a PDF version of the desired article will be downloaded to the device, which can be printed, stored, sent by email or instant messaging and, in short, consulted whenever desired. This file is automatically generated by Wikipedia itself with all the information updated at the moment. Because we must remember that Wikipedia is constantly growing and every day thousands of articles are created and many more are edited.
But there may be someone who wishes to have their own offline version of Wikipediato be able to consult any content at any time even without an Internet connection. In this case, the process does not depend directly on this online encyclopedia, since Wikipedia does not allow full downloading of all its contents. Instead, it is necessary to resort to third parties that allow this option, particularly the Kiwix platform, which in turn offers two ways to achieve this.
The first involves using kiwix’s open source softwarewhich can be downloaded for different operating systems and installed as a browser extension. Kiwix allows downloading copies of Wikipedia that have been compiled by the platform’s users themselves. There are text-only versions and others that also include the images included in each Wikipedia article, but these are very large files that can take up several gigabytes… and that’s a lot of files.
The other possibility is to download external copies available in all languages that Kiwix has compiled on its own website. They are available in .zim format files that will have to be managed with the application developed by Kiwix for this purpose.
