In light of the recent Crowdstrike crash revealing how weak points in IT infrastructure can have wide ranging effects, I figured this might be an interesting one.
The entirety of wikipedia is periodically uploaded here, along with many other useful wikis and How To websites (ex. iFixit tutorials and WikiHow): https://download.kiwix.org/zim
You select the archive you want, then the language and archive version (for example, you can get an archive with no pictures, to save on space). For the totality of the english wikipedia you’d select the “wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim”
The archives are packed as .zim files, which can be read with the Kiwix app completely offline.
I have several USBs I keep that have some of these archives along with the app installer. In the event of some major catastrophe I’d at least be able to access some potentially useful information. I have no stake in Kiwix, and don’t know if there are other alternative apps and schemes, just thought it was neat.
The text version of Wikipedia*
The images and other media are a hell of a lot more.
it’s 102GB with images, 53GB without
The 100Gb version mentioned above does only have thumbnails/lowres pictures, yeah. Better than nothing for some types of articles, but not everything. The true text-only version is actually only ~53Gb though.
Some of the high res photos are ridiculous.
Like a 8000x9000 uncompressed image of someone’s hand and weighs about 22mb.
I know that because I use a lot of royalty free images.
Without images Wikipedia is a “mere” 22.14gb.
I’ve installed game patches that were larger than this.
They should put it in a popular game patch.
Aside from the text clarification, this is also only the US version of Wikipedia.
What worries me though is that most videos linked on Wikipedia are hosted on YouTube. That’s a pretty dangerous choke point.
I never even noticed any videos on Wikipedia. Maybe for some cinema articles.
My brain immediately thought archive.org but after the last incident, I kinda feel like archive org is going to get lawsuited into oblivion
I tried searching but found nothing. What incident?
Is there a git repo for it or do I have to redownload the whole thing to do an update?
i remember a time when it was only 2gb for all of wikipedia. usain bolt had just burst onto the world stage at the time.
And by now he’s exited the solar system at incomprehensible speeds.
I did! I do! Also all public domain books as part of the project Gutenberg
I know there are a few companies working on DNA storage. From the comment below about the entirety of Wikipedia and Wiki Commons, I’d say that’d be a pretty practical thing to store.
Here’s the wiki article about it.
Imagine downloading it just after some troll changed critical information lmao
I imagine you could also download with all the history of every article
I tried to download it but couldn’t get it to work :(
Download the kiwix app for whatever OS you’re using, then go into Kiwix and click on the folder icon in the app and navigate to where the .zim file you downloaded is located. If you click it it should automatically pop-up and be viewable.
If you did that and it’s still failing, is it giving you a specific error or anything?
