Wikipedia offline explorer recommendations

Question

I have been using XOWA all these while. But there are other explorers as well (see here). The thing I like about XOWA is that its rendering is impeccable. But the downside is that it needs too much space. Will any of the other explorers give me a better compromise? Other desirable feature should be - if I want to update my wiki, I should just be downloading the update and not the whole wiki all over again. In other words, the option to build one's wiki should be there.

So I need recommendations for Offline Wikipedia Explorer with the following requirements:

• Reasonably good rendering. Put precisely, all the math, latex and text should be displayed right. I don't care much about table of contents or images and such things.
• Should take less space than XOWA does. For example, see Disk Space Usage for XOWA. I am willing to compromise on some of the things.
• And should be convenient to update. To update, I should be downloading only the latest dump and not the whole wiki all over again.

Please advise!

Answer 1

I'm the XOWA developer, and just wanted to add some information (sadly, I don't have the reputation to comment directly on the question.)

Space usage is definitely a priority in the coming months. I've been spending a lot of time on XOWA Android recently -- where space is at a premium. Several dozen GB is a lot to demand from users, especially in a world where new phones don't have any microSD capability.

Anyway, based on Android, I'm planning on the following:

• Using lower quality images: Keep in mind XOWA uses the exact images from Wikipedia's articles. However, most users probably don't need full fidelity, and can get by with lower quality. One user suggested a matrix for downscaling and that should reduce usage by 25+ GB. (https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/36#issuecomment-169303189)
• Changing the PC version to use the HTML dumps: This will eliminate the need for having a local wikidata.org instance which will save another 20 GB.
• Aggressively compressing the HTML dumps: XOWA currently weighs in at about 30 GB for the HTML dumps. I think I can get that down to 20 GB, but it requires quite a bit of code on my side.

All told, I'm targeting a limit of 64 GB in usage. I know that still sounds high, but the compressed wikitext for English Wikipedia is 12 GB, and HTML + images is going to add a lot more. XOWA is at about 120 GB now, and I'm hoping that halving it will be enough. Feel free to say otherwise!

Finally, I realize that complete rebuilds are cumbersome -- especially for Android. I'm working on an incremental update that should just sync differences, though that will take a few months.

Hope you're willing to wait for the upcoming changes. Also, thanks for the praise on the rendering; I really do try to match MediaWiki as closely as possible. If you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks!