Help/Overview

Summary

XOWA is an application for reading and editing wikis offline. It aims to provide full offline access to all content in every Wikimedia Foundation wiki.

Features

XOWA has several features:

• Displays all articles from a Wikimedia data dump.
• Works with English Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, as well as the non-English language counterparts (for example, French Wikipedia).
• Renders articles with full HTML formatting.
• Downloads images and other files on demand.
• Edits articles.
• Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Raspberry PI, and Android.
• Installs to a flash memory card for portability to other machines.
• Is customizable and extendable at many levels: from keyboard shortcuts to HTML layouts to internal options.
• Is open-source under the AGPLv3 license.

Supported wikis

XOWA should work with any dump that has been generated by MediaWiki software. It has been personally tested for over 200 wikis, including:

• English Wikipedia
• The English sister projects: Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikinews
• Non-English Wikipedias including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and many more.
• Unique wikis including Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikispecies, MediaWiki, Meta-wiki, Incubator, WikimediaFoundation

For a full list, see Dashboard/Import/Online and Dashboard/Image_databases

Philosophy

XOWA is free software. The code is open source under the AGPLv3 license, and available to anyone for review or modification. See Help/License/Code for more information as well as https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa.

XOWA advocates free content. All documentation and project artifacts are provided under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. See Help/License/Docs for more information.

XOWA values user privacy. It will never collect and upload personal information. It is designed to be run in a standalone environment, without any connection to the internet. See Help/Privacy/Desktop for more information.