Accessing WikiPedia is easy when you’re online, but have you ever wanted
to take it along with you for off-line situations? I have, and there is a
lovely program to do so for Windows: WikiTaxi. You don’t have to install
the program; just extract it from its 7zip archive and put it in a
convenient location somewhere on your Windows drive. After downloading one of
the page dumps from Wikimedia, you convert (to SQLite) the
compressed page dump file (e.g. enwiki-.....-pages-articles.xml.bz2
) to
WikiTaxi’s format with the included importer program, which takes a while: on
my system the converter ran for just over an hour to translate the full
WikiPedia compressed XML source (3.3GB) to WikiTaxi’s format, resulting in a
5.89 GB file. WikiTaxi is well documented, and it is fun
to use. The only thing missing are WikiPedia’s images, but those are
difficult to acquire.