XOWA Makes It Easy to Download Wikipedia for Offline Reading
If you have enough disk space, you can download the entire Wikipedia. And an application called XOWA simplifies this process.
As How-To Geek points out, there are several reasons why you might want to download Wikipedia. Perhaps you want your kids to be able to use it for research without giving them access to the Internet. Maybe you want to turn your laptop into an encyclopedia that you can use even when you’re offline. Whatever your reason, XOWA is a free and open source application that makes this possible.
You must have Java installed, but it works with any system. After you download the files you want from the XOWA download page and run the application, you will see the main page. From here go to Tools> Download Center. In the Download Center, you can choose from various options, such as which versions of the Wiki you want, what language you want to save everything in, and whether you want images.
Obviously, depending on your parameters, your downloads can take up quite a lot of space:
If you just want to download a simple version of Wikipedia, which consists of just under 122,000 articles, it will take just over 420 MB of disk space. If you add images, that’s another 2 GB. The full English version of Wikipedia will set you back a whopping 45 GB, while adding images will add another 99 GB, so that’s almost 150 GB of disk space when everything is downloaded and installed.
However, after you complete the process, you will have access to Wikipedia from anywhere. You can even download it to your Android device. Go to the full How-To Geek post for more information.
XOWA via How-To Geek