Extension:Offline

Overview
This extension provides an offline viewing mode for Wikipedia or other dumps made from a mediawiki project. It is similar to the kiwix / zim offline reader, but requires the user to run a webserver. As a proof-of-concept, it demonstrates that an editable, standalone wiki is simple to implement and run, on low-end desktop hardware. The challenge is to elaborate this concept into something useful and usable.

See the Extension:Offline/Wiki project page, or the old project page for wikipedia-offline-patch.

Be aware that you will need a Wikipedia dump in .xml.bz2 format, and the corresponding index, see "Installing" for tips on how to configure your data.

For a recent English, compressed backup of all article text (7.4GB, not including your index): For example, visit enwiki/20111201/ and download enwiki/20111201/enwiki-20111201-pages-articles.xml.bz2

or, browse backup dumps from many other languages and wiki projects: backup-index.html

A small, real-world database in Tagalog can be found here, with indexes built already: http://wikipedia-offline-patch.googlecode.com/files/wiki-splits-tl.zip

And a minimal sample database is available in the tests/ directory of this project.

The old project page has binary distributions for macos, windows, and linux, which include a webserver and supporting libraries. It also explains how to build and run the indexer.

There is an unusual dependency: the Xapian indexing library and its PHP bindings. Also, you will have to configure some type of revision_text caching by setting $wgRevisionCacheExpiry and $wgCacheType. memcached is a popular one.

User rights
= Acknowledgements = The current maintainer is Adam Wight, who can be reached at adamw on ludd.net.

Thanassis Tsiodras has a great page explaining how to build an offline wikipedia from simple tools you might find around the house.

Wikipedia Offline Client was the starting point of the code here.

MediaWiki developers contributed valuable insight.

This software and its source code are licensed as GPL.