No doubt, Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. There are over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and it is still growing at a rapid pace. Wikipedia even though is not the perfect source of information, but if it is good enough to be used every day by millions of people, and it would be good if it can be accessed offline as not everyone has access to the net 24/7. Below are 8 ways where you can access Wikipedia Offline on your PC and Mobiles.

1. WikiTaxi

WikiTaxi is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go. WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small. The huge English Wikipedia easily fits on a 8 GB memory stick.

Download WikiTaxi.

2. WikiSlices

WikiSlice as the name suggests is a slice of Wikipedia based on a particular topic. WikiSlices make Wikipedia easy to explore. Wikipedia allows you to only search for information. WikiSlices help you browse through this information. While using Wikipedia, you may have felt the need to view related topics or sub-topics. When you create a WikiSlice, the topics and sub topics are displayed prominently, so that you can quickly view them. You also see popular pages related to what you are searching or browsing. The most important feature of WikiSlices is that you can download it on your desktop or laptop and access the information even when you are offline or on the go. WikiSlices can be used offline with the help of the Webaroo software. If you don’t have the software, the software will be downloaded automatically when you download your first WikiSlice.

3. Pocket Wikipedia

Pocket Wikipedia is an excellent freeware application that brings Wikipedia pages to your PC and Windows Mobiles for offline reading. The Pocket Wikipedia comes as a 175 MB zipped file (not even required to install!) that has hand picked pages of Wikipedia with 14 Million words and 24,000 images.  The wide range of topics covered by this freeware are good enough to read when you are on the move. It works on Windows Mobiles, Linux PCs and Windows PCs.

Download Pocket Wikipedia.

4. Zipedia

Zipedia is actually the second (Wikipedia Taxi was the first) application that downloads Wikipedia and provides offline access to it’s contents. The main difference between Wikipedia Taxi and Zipedia is that the latter is a Firefox add-on which adds the Wikipedia offline search right into Firefox. The contents of Wikipedia can then be accessed by typing in wikipedia://wiki/ into the address bar.

5. GearsMonkey Script (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey + Google Gears)

By using Gears with the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin, you can inject Gears code into any website that you want. In order to access Wikipedia pages offline, for each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

You need the following tools to take Wikipedia offline:

1. Greasemonkey – Use Greasemonkey to inject Gears code onto a webpage after it loads
2. Gears – You’ll be utilizing all three components that make up Gears:
   • LocalServer: Capture any URL
   • Database (local to computer): Keep track of what URLs you have stored, personal preferences, etc.
   • WorkerPool (threading): Keep the UI snappy — run heavy computations, data synchronizations, etc. in the background. Also can help overcome cross-origin dilemmas.
3. iFrame – Use in conjunction with Greasemonkey to allow for capture of cross-origin resources.

6. MediaWiki

As we all know, Wikipedia runs on the open source software MediaWiki. This in turn runs on top of MySQL and PHP, as well as possibly Linux and Apache. If you would like to access Wikipedia offline, then you can install your own MediaWiki and download pages dump of Wikipedia to your hard disk. So, all you have to do is:

• Install WAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP on Windows).
• Install MediaWiki.
• Download and install a pages dump of Wikipedia.

7. Unyverse

Unyverse is a new service to access Wikipedia with your Java or Windows Mobile phone, from anywhere. It uses a small smart client application and has the following advantages over the pure WAP/mobile web access:

1. You can read your previously downloaded articles offline when you have no connection
2. Reading experience is optimized with nice table of contents, page by page formatting, and change font size which is important when reading on a small screen
3. Entire content is downloaded compressed, so it is faster
4. You can synchronize your bookmarked article with your free Unyverse web account.

8. iPhone/iPod Touch Wikipedia Offline Reader

This app is a Wikipedia Offline reader for your iPhone/iPod Touch. It indexes and dumps are almost exactly 2GB together of Wikipedia content into your iPhone/iPod Touch hard disk. To install, put the app in /Applications. Use something like Customize.app to get it onto your springboard. Untar the dump, and put the contents at /var/root/wp. If using Windows, check out the video installation tutorial.

Download this application – Wikipedia.zip (current version: 0.2.3) and Wikipedia Dump (English, 2007).

Do you know other ways to access Wikipedia offline?. Please leave your comments and share them with me.