Always wanted to use wikipedia without the internet ? Want to carry wikipedia on your flash drive ? It is possible to do so. WikiTaxi is a free software which enables you to read, browse through wikipedia articles when offline. You do not need the Internet connection once you download the wiki pages using the software. WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that database does not become too large. One can easily carry the English wikpedia on a 8 GB USB flash disk.
Installation
WikiTaxi does not need to be installed. You can just extract the .zip file from the downloaded file. WikiTaxi only creates a .ini file which is present in the folder with the .exe file. So the software does not modify the Windows and also does not use any database engine or html browser.
Downloading a Wikipedia Backup
1. Click on the .exe file.
2. You are greeted by a welcome screen. Move down to Download the Wiki backup section. It contains links to popular downloads. For the smallest download click on Simple English.
3. There appears a list of simplewiki backups by date. Select the latest one. Click on the directory latest.
4. Scroll to find the file implewiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 and download this file. This will contain all the articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages for the wiki.
Extract Wiki articles to Wiki database
1. After the xml file has been downloaded you’ll need to extract the articles to a database.Open the file WikiTaxi_Importer.exe. This has to be done just once.
2. In the importer window , select the downloaded xml file. Also select the destination for database file.
3. After this, just click on the import button.
View the WikiTaxi Databse
1. To view the WikiTaxi database, double on WikiTaxi .exe
2. A list of all downloaded directories are shown in the window. Click on the the downloaded directory.
3. Now use the search feature same as in Wikipedia to search for a specific topic.
Download WIkiTaxi
