Practically all the knowledge of civilization today seems to be concentrated in Wikipedia, a worthy successor to the “Encyclopedia” that the enlightened French Diderot and D’alembert gave birth to in the 18th century . The great advantage is that instead of large volumes of complicated updating, in the case of Wikipedia, all you have to do is connect to the Internet from any device to access its unfathomable amount of information.
This advantage, however, also has a drawback, and that is not being able to access said content if you don’t have an Internet connection, but fortunately there is a solution: download Wikipedia. And also with two options: complete download or just the desired article.
This last option may be the most recommended if you want to save certain data for later consultation or to read more calmly, in the case of especially long or long articles. It is very easy to achieve this since, once you have located the Wikipedia article you are interested in, you only need to select the “Print/Export – Download as PDF” option in the left 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, ultimately, 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 wants to have their own offline version of Wikipedia , to 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 the complete download of all its contents. Instead, you have to resort to third parties that allow this option, particularly the Kiwix platform, which in turn offers two ways to achieve it.
The first involves using Kiwix’s open source software , which can be downloaded for different operating systems and installed as a browser extension. Kiwix allows you to download copies of Wikipedia that have been compiled by the users of the platform. There are only text versions and others that also include the images included in each Wikipedia article, but they are very heavy files that can occupy several gigabytes… and there are many files.
The other possibility is to download external copies available in all languages that Kiwix has compiled on their own website. They are available in .zim format files that will have to be handled with the application developed by Kiwix for this purpose.
