I will not discuss in this post the reasons why a person is may occur down the Wikipedia. For now, the practical utility that I found so far is that I have a backup for when I am no internet connection, and that I can pass a copy to friends who have no connection to be retrievable. Wikimedia Foundation

periodically backs up all the contents of Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, etc.. These are called dumps, and you can view the status of the dump backup
this page.
Within each of the "dumps", we can download various versions, the most recommended which contains only the text of the articles, pages without discussion or change history (remember that the idea is to use the alternative, when you can not access the online version). The file in question always has the name-articles.xml.bz2
pages.
order to view the contents of this file, we recommend using WikiTaxi
. Is a free and portable application for Windows (sorry Linux users), which is responsible for presenting a human language text articles and allows you to search, follow the links, etc.
To use it, you have to download it from here
, extract the file in the folder you want, and you get two executables and some files configuration.
With Wikitaxi_Importer.exe import the files. Bz2 we went down, indicating the location of pages-articles.xml.bz2 in the field above (Example:
C: \\ Wikidumps \\ pages-articles.xml.bz2
) and where we want to save the file to import into the box below (eg,
C: \\ WikiTaxi \\ Wikipedia.taxi
). The process is quite fast, and here we are (almost) ready to use the Wikipedia offline.
Now, we run Wikitaxi.exe, click where it says "click here to open
an existing database " and look for the file you import (
C: \\ WikiTaxi \\ Wikipedia.taxi
in this case). Ready, WikiTaxi will display a page random, and on top can start looking for what interests us.
can import several dumps of various Wikimedia projects (if the file-articles.xml.bz2 pages) and thus able to consult the Wikipedia in English or other languages \u200b\u200bWikisource (text books that are in the public domain) , Wikiquote (quotations by subject or author), Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary form, etc.).
Finally, I leave my recommended to lower import and save on DVDs.
English:
Wikipedia (updated on November 26, 2008 - 619.4 MB)
Wikisource (updated on November 8, 2008 - 84.2 MB)
Wikiquote
(updated on November 12, 2008 - 4.0 MB)
English:
Wikipedia (updated on October 8, 2008 - 4.1 GB)
Wikisource (updated on October 12, 2008 - 417.5 MB )
Wikiquote (updated on November 26, 2008 - 39.0 MB)
French:
Wikipedia (updated on October 17, 2008 - 936.5 MB)
Wikisource (updated on November 14, 2008 - 289.0 MB)
Wikiquote (updated on November 15, 2008 - 2.3 MB)
For more information about downloading the dumps of Wikipedia, please visit
this page and on WikiTaxi ,
this page. Here