Wikimedia projects offline explorer alternative to Wikitaxi?

Question

I use Wikitaxi to take and explore Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. offline.

It has many good features compared to wget like mirrored versions of Wikimedia projects:

• single archive file
• comparatively small size on disk
• indexed / fast
• easier to download

But it still lacks a lot and has drawbacks like:

• lots of important info appears cryptic as {{#invoke:etymology language/templates|etyl}}
• images and audio missing

Are there any alternative to get Wikimedia projects offline other than Wikitaxi?

Answer 1

I would recommend Kiwix, a project run by a Wikimedia chapter that should work fine and where you can get support. It works on a variety of platforms.

Kiwix is portable and you can get binaries for many OSs.

Unlike Wikitaxi you cannot build by yourself the content files (.ZIM for Kiwix) from the latest dump files, but you can find decently recent files here for the most used Wikimedia sites(Wikipedia is from July 2014).

Also the result is more readable than Wikitaxi

So the only major drawback is that you cannot build yourself a .ZIM from the latest dump files.

Answer 2

^{Later edit:}

XOWA

If you want a complete mirror of Wikipedia (including images), Wiktionari, Wikiquote, etc full HTML formatting intact that will download in aprox 30 hours, you should use:

English Wikipedia has a lot of data. There are 13.9+ million pages with 20.0+ GB of text, as well as 3.7+ million thumbnails.

XOWA:

Setting all this up on your computer will not be a quick process... The import itself will require 80GB of disk space and five hours processing time for the text version. If you want images as well, the numbers increase to 100GB 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 128GB SD card.

But the offline version is very much like the online version, includes photos etc: (I tested the bellow article completely offline)

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Other notable projects beside Xowa, Wikitaxi and Kiwix mentioned already, are:

• Aard Dictionary is a free software dictionary with binaries for Windows, Linux, Mac and Android. Can build its own offline data from Wikimedia dumps or XDXF files with the help of Aard Tools(Aard Tools needs linux/unix and pyhton 2.7). Aard Dictionary has available many of the Wikimedia projects in many languages already pre-built but also other dictionaries like WordNet, etc.

  

  Aard Dictionary doesn't need to index as Kiwix does when you first load an offline data file, also is much faster, and it searches in all the available dictionaries at the same time displaying all the matching term in separate tabs.

• Okawix which works on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android. Cannot build its own offline data but has available many of the Wikimedia projects in many languages already pre-built.

• FastWiki which works on Windows, Linux and Android. Can build its own offline data from dumps or ZIM files.