Kiwix
FreeThe whole of Wikipedia on your disk, readable with no network at all
An open-source offline reader for ZIM archives. Download once and the whole of Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Project Gutenberg or Khan Academy sits on your local disk, needing no network afterwards. Desktop and mobile apps exist, and kiwix-serve can publish an archive to your local network for others to read.
Why we picked it
GPL-3.0, a non-profit project with long-standing partners including UNESCO and Wikimedians Without Borders.
It solves one concrete problem: looking things up with no network. The full English Wikipedia with images compresses to a bit over a hundred gigabytes, or a few tens of gigabytes for text only — small enough to carry on an external drive. Open Kiwix and full-text search, links, contents and images all work much as they do online.
The available archives go well beyond Wikipedia: all of Stack Exchange's questions and answers, Project Gutenberg's public-domain books, Khan Academy courses, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and TED talks all ship as prepared ZIM files.
The real uses are more numerous than they sound. Boats, mountains, basements, aeroplanes; regions under network restrictions or outages; a local knowledge base for a school computer room; and a standing copy on a preparedness drive. kiwix-serve turns an archive into a site on your local network, letting one Raspberry Pi serve a whole classroom.
To be clear about:
- Archives are static snapshots — the version at the moment you downloaded it, with no automatic updates. Getting a newer one means downloading a fresh archive.
- Full editions are large and need planning for bandwidth and disk. Official trimmed editions (popular articles only, or text only) fit in a few gigabytes.