How to Download Wikipedia?

Last night in my Orkut Community Books and Books , I found a request for encyclopedia , a member wanted history encyclopedia with images.

So here is a way to download the biggest encyclopedia

Wikipedia – A huge ultimate reference material and knowledge hub which attracts millions of people everyday who are drowned in the deep linked articles filled with huge amount of information.If you do a quick search on the Internet for wikipedia cd’s then you will get lot’s of products containing wikipedia articles,pages which are required to be purchased.

But the cost is a bit too expensive,also there are some free service discussed in this post which allows you to read and download the content and required articles to access wiki offline.Not everyone has a unlimited Internet connection or many people tend to use Wiki as a source of  reference offline as it is much faster and easy.

Definitely you can’t save each page of wikipedia pages on your hard disk,even if you do then it takes lot of time.So if you are wondering how to get most of the articles pages easily and for free then read on..

Do you know that it is possible to download the entire Wikipedia Encyclopedia to your computer and use it offline. Other than static HTML pages, you can also download all the images and photographs from the Wikipedia website in one go.

The full Wikipedia website and the images are available in zipped format that can be extracted using the free 7-zip utility.

Example:
Download Wikipedia HTML webpages – Nov 2006 Dump

Download Wikipedia Images – November 2005 Dump

These dumps are intended for private viewing in an intranet or desktop installation – you may not host them on a public website.

Geeks may prefer to download Wikipedia Database Dumps that are vast and have more current information than the static HTML dumps. These are essentially XML files for MediaWiki software that can be imported back in SQL databases using freely available php scripts.However, These methods are not easy.

For more visit this :  http://download.wikimedia.org/

Download Wikipedia free Package :

Pocket Wikipedia is a excellent freeware application which downloads the  Wikipedia pages to your PC and Windows Mobiles for offline usage. This Pocket Wikipedia has a 175 MB zipped fileof Wikipedia articles with 14 Million words and 24,000 images (size of a fifteen volume encyclopedia ) which has enough pages and required information to access offline.

Pocket wikipedia works on Windows Mobiles, Linux PCs and Windows PCs.You can download all the 14 million words with images,article,pages using rapidshare or primary download link.A good way to access wikipedia anywhere,anytime.

Click here to download Pocket Pedia (Primary download)

Click here to download Pocket Pedia (Rapidshare)

Firefox Offline Wikipedia addon :

Firefox browser supports addons which makes it one of the finest useful browser,here is a tricky addon called as Zipedia.When you have no Internet, or when the Internet is so slow, this addon will help you access everything offline on your computer.Zipedia can process such compressed wiki dump to be used locally on your computer.

Example – ‘wikipedia://wiki/Egypt’ for immediate offline access to a wikipedia article without Internet connection.

First you will have to download the wikipedia XML dump for offline use (no need to run neither MySQL nor mediawiki ).Now install the Zipedia addon and Go to Tools-> Add-ons-> zipedia-> preferences. The wizard will guide you through the steps of downloading the wikipedia XML dump (~3G for the English wiki) and the conversion process which is simple and will take few hours.

Download XLM wiki dump

Download Firefox extension Zipedia

Note: While it is possible to download wikipedia using software like wget or httrack, Wikipedia policies prohibit using web crawlers to download large number of articles from Wikipedia servers.

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