How can I view (offline) the full English Wikipedia on OS X?

I want to download the complete English Wikipedia (not just the 45,000 article version floating around) for viewing offline on my Mac.

I have downloaded Okawix, and downloaded a torrent with Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.okawix, available on the okawix site) to view within Okawix. However, I can't figure out how to view this downloaded torrent within Okawix, so I'm not sure what I can do.

What is the best way to do this? Is there software to download and view Wikipedia?


Solution 1:

It's not clear how you want to use the data once it's on your mac.

To narrow this down a bit, you can refer to the page that wikipedia has made to guide people like you that want to get a local copy of content and actually use it.

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Pay particular attention to the sections:

  • Help importing dumps into MySQL
  • Static HTML tree dumps
  • Dynamic HTML generation from a local XML database dump

The first option has you loading the dumps into your own database and is the most powerful, but means you will be running your own web server / database - your own little copy of wikipedia on your mac. The second two are guides to simply opening the dumped files in a web browser or other program that can render HTML and follow the links to files that rest on your mac's file system.