App/Import/English Wikipedia

Background

English Wikipedia has a lot of data. There are over 16 million pages with 25 GB of text, as well as 5 million images.

Setting all this up on your computer will not be a quick process. As a general estimate, you will need at least 30 GB and 5 hours processing time. If you want images as well, the numbers increase to 100 GB of disk space and 30+ hours of processing time. However, when you are done, you will have a complete, recent copy of English Wikipedia with images that can fit on a 128 GB SD card.

Although the process itself is not hard, I strongly recommend that you try Simple Wikipedia first. Simple Wikipedia has 180,000 pages and 90,000 images. The text version uses 200 MB and sets up in 5 minutes. With images, this expands to 2 GB and 30 minutes of downloading time. Simple Wikipedia is a reasonably accurate simulation of English Wikipedia -- just much smaller. It'll also give you a pretty good idea of what XOWA can do.

Quick start

Articles

There are two approaches:

• Download pre-built wikis from archive.org
• Build wikis using the database dumps at wikimedia.org

Download pre-built wikis from archive.org

• Go to Special:XowaDownloadCentral from the URL bar within XOWA. You can also do Main Menu -> Tools -> Download Central
• In the Available table, add the task names that start off with English Wikipedia - Articles
• In the Queue table, click the Play button
• Wait for the Queue to process. When it is done, enter the wiki URL in the bar. For example, en.wikipedia.org

Build wikis using the database dumps at wikimedia.org

• Go to Dashboard/Import/Online
• Find en.wikipedia.org in the list
• Click the download link.
• Wait for the wiki to build. When it is done, it will automatically load the Main Page

Images

• Go to Special:XowaDownloadCentral from the URL bar within XOWA. You can also do Main Menu -> Tools -> Download Central
• In the Available table, add the task names that start off with English Wikipedia - Images and English Wikipedia - Image Update
• In the Queue table, click the Play button
• Wait for the Queue to process. When it is done, enter any page in the bar. For example, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Detailed start

See Wiki_setup/English_wikis