Kiwix : offline Wikipedia viewer

Official site : http://www.kiwix.org/

If your Internet access is expensive/rare/slow/unreliable/watched/censored, you still can browse amazing amounts of knowledge and culture.
The content is packages in file archives called ZIM files.
Once you have downloaded material from the Kiwix website, you will be able to read material from Wikipedia and many other sources.
You can search among the article titles, and read any of these articles offline, without needing Internet access.
All the content of Wikipedia is inside your device (including the images). It might also work with any content in the OpenZIM format, but has been only tested on the Wikipedia ones.

Note : version 1.x of this application was designed for Evopedia archives and it's still compatible with it, but this format and project are now discontinued.

Usage

Step 1 : download some content

from http://download.kiwix.org/zim/, with a regular computer. Currently only Wikimedia contents (ZIM files in wiki* subdirectories, for instance http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/) have been tested. There are known bugs when reading other contents; and audio/video/dynamic contents are not supported for now.
For a quick test, you can start with the "Ray Charles" ZIM file : it contains some wikipedia articles about Ray Charles.
After that, you can download materials in your language. Check the size before you download files as many of the files are large (several Gigabytes).
If the file is larger than 2 GB, it might not be supported by your device if your storage is formatted using a FAT filesystem. If so, it's possible to split the material into several 2GB files : see the Kiwix FAQ

Step 2 : copy the content onto your device

If you have enough space, you can put several archives.

Step 3 : open the extension, go to the "Configure" menu and select your ZIM file

Step 4 : enjoy Wikipedia offline!

Privacy policy

Short answer :

This application works offline. We do not collect any of your personal data and don't even know what you are doing with this application.

Longer answer :

Anyway, if you think your Internet access can be watched and/or if you are paranoid, you should shut down your 3G and Wifi access before using the application.
This application only reads the archive files of your device : it does not read any other files.

Feedback / helping / contributing

This application is still a work in progress. There are many bugs and improvements that need to be done. In particular :

• Issue #114 : Add a way to easily download ZIM files directly to the device
• Issue #13 : All the user interface is in English : I plan to translate it at least in French. If you feel able to translate it in your language, please contact me
• Issue #172 and #152 : Handle video and javascript content
• Issue #126 : Load the welcome page at first startup
• Issue #117 : Better handle upper/lowercase and accents/diacritics in title search
• Performance improvements etc.

Suggestions and patches/pull requests are welcome : the source code is on github. The bugtracker is on github too. We use it as our roadmap.
Alternatively, you can send your feedback by email.
In all cases, please give as much detail as you can : which device you are using, which version of Kiwix, which archive, which articles etc.

If you like the Kiwix project and use it, please consider giving donations :

• to the Wikimedia foundation, to help maintaining their servers and article contents. See the donation page
• to Kiwix, to help maintaining the ZIM files and applications. There is a donation button in the home page of kiwix.org

You can also help by :

• Adding articles or improving the existing ones, by editing online wikipedia articles
• Participating in the Kiwix project

Credits

We have to distribute some thanks to :

• Kelson and all the Kiwix community for welcoming peter-x and me in this project
• Wikipedia teams and contributors to help spreading knowledge to everybody
• All the developers of libraries and tools I used for releasing them as Free software (see License paragraph)

License information

Copyright 2013-2017 Mossroy, Peter-x and contributors
This application is licensed under the GPL v3 license :

Kiwix is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

Kiwix is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Kiwix (file LICENSE-GPLv3.txt). If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

Main libraries and ressources used :

• jQuery 2, released under the MIT license
• Bootstrap 3, released under the Apache license 2.0, which includes icons from Glyphicons
• RequireJS 2, released under the MIT license or new BSD license
• QUnit 2, released under the MIT license
• Kiwix logo from kiwix.org, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
• OpenZIM specifications from www.openzim.org, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
• Emscripten to generate a XZ decompressor in javascript : https://github.com/kripken/emscripten, released under the MIT license
• XZ Embedded (the XZ library converted to Javascript with Emscripten), in public domain

Other platforms/versions

Other Kiwix clients exist on various platforms. See the official site : http://www.kiwix.org/

Configuration

This application needs a ZIM archive to work. If you did not download one yet, please see the About section

Expert settings