Would you like to download the entire Wikipedia on your computer or mobile phone for offline reading? Well, here are some good options to consider.
download wikipedia offline

Download Wikipedia Articles for Offline Reading

 

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, offers downloadable copies (or database dumps) of all its wikis that one can download and thus access the entire Wikipedia content on computers that are not connected to the Internet.
The database dumps are frequently updated and include every single article that’s available on the main Wikipedia website. The dumps are available as .xml.bz2 files that you can easily open on your computer using the free and portable WikiTaxi software.
WikiTaxi ships with an importer that will first uncompress the Wikipedia database files (.bz2) and then converts them into a .taxi file format. Now you open these .taxi files inside WikiTaxi just like the way you open .doc files inside Microsoft Word and, if you are running low on space, the original Wikipedia dumps may be safely discarded.
A good alternative to WikiTaxi is Kiwix – this is also free software and available for Mac, Windows and Linux systems. You first install the Kiwix software on your computer and then download one of the Wikipedia editions – the articles are packaged as .zim files that’ll open directly inside Kiwix without requiring any conversion.
Kiwix is definitely easier to use than WikiTaxi and that packaged .zim files can read across all popular platforms but the downside is that, unlike the database dumps used by WikiTaxi, the .zim files aren’t very frequently updated. Also, the zim package for English Wikipedia doesn’t include every article though the packages for other languages are complete.
If you have an iOS device – like the iPhone, iPad or iPad Touch – you may grab the excellent Wiki Offline app and carry all the Wikipedia articles in your pocket. The app renders Wikipedia articles in a beautiful interface and supports tabbed browsing so you can open multiple articles side by side. Wiki Offline is also available in the Mac App Store for your Mac OS X.
The other option for using Wikipedia offline is WikiReader – this is a 3.5” monochrome device with a capacitive touch screen and contains over 3 million Wikipedia articles. The  updates to Wikipedia articles are released every quarter – you can update the device by connecting it to your computer – or you opt to receive updates on SD cards.
The WikiReader device costs  $99 and though I haven’t tried it myself, it did get a huge thumbs-up from Ars Technica. You definitely don’t need this if you carry a smart phone that is always connected to the Internet but could be a good reference tool for the rest of us with an impressive battery life – much like the Kindle.
Finally, if all you want to do is download a handful of Wikipedia articles for offline reading, use the built-in book creator that turns multiple pages from Wikipedia into a PDF book.





Will Wikipedia Ever Accept Advertising?

 

ads on wikipedia
The Wikimedia Foundation recently completed a massive fundraising drive and managed to raise some $16 million in donations from over 500,000 users of Wikipedia worldwide.
Wikipedia has a long-standing no-ad policy and the money raised through these donations would help the Wikimedia Foundation pay for all their staff and expenses and still remain ad-free for all of 2011.
Like most other non-profits, Wikipedia banks on donations to stay afloat but what happens if people don’t donate in such large numbers. Will they then accept advertising or shut down Wikipedia?
When TIME Magazine asked this exact question to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, here’s what he said:
While we’ve always said that we’re opposed to having advertising on Wikipedia, we’ve never said “absolutely never.”
According to Wales, if they’re unable to raise sufficient funds through donations in future, they’ll first look at cost-cutting measures and then may include ads in “some obscure locations” to keep Wikipedia alive. That’s very unlikely though!

Wikipedia Logo Flattened

 

This is current logo of Wikipedia. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle arranged in the shape of a 3D globe and each of the puzzle pieces contain a symbol that represents some language or character set.
Wikipedia Logo
The font used in the Wikipedia logo is Linux Libertine which is both open source and free.

Wikipedia Logo – Flat Form

If you were to flatten the Wikipedia logo, it will look something like this:
Wikipedia Logo - Flat
You should visit wikipedia.org/Wikipedia_logos to learn more about their puzzle logo

 Wikipedia as a Printed Book – Seriously!

The English edition of Wikipedia Encyclopedia contains around 3 million articles as of now and if someone were to print the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia into a book, the size of that book would roughly be equivalent to 952 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Not sure if anyone is willing to go that far but a student in UK has actually converted 0.01% of the Wikipedia encyclopedia into a printed book. See some pictures below:
wikipedia book
Also see: How to Print Wikipedia Articles
wikipedia printed
This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. And, as you can easily make out from the photographs, the book is huge – it’s about 1ft 7in. high or just as tall as a 30″ widescreen monitor.
The more interesting part is that, Rob Matthews, who came up with this idea of printing Wikipedia, also has plans to sell this book.


Print Multiple Wikipedia Articles to a Single PDF

 Do you know that you can directly save any Wikipedia page as a PDF file without requiring any extensions or print drivers. In fact, you can even collect multiple Wikipedia pages in a basket and convert them all to a single PDF document (just like an ebook) with just a few mouse clicks.

For instance, here’s a PDF book on search engines (PDF) that was created from a set of Wikipedia pages using the built-in tools of Wikipedia and nothing else. As you will soon notice, PDF books generated by Wikipedia are perfectly formatted for printing and they even include all references and citations that are found in the original Wikipedia articles.