Open-source offline browser for public domain projects
Kiwix
Developer(s) Desktop 2.3.1 / 16 April 2023; 11 months ago (2023-04-16 )
[1] Android 3.6.0 / 10 September 2022; 18 months ago (2022-09-10 )
[2] iOS 1.15.6 / 24 May 2022; 22 months ago (2022-05-24 )
[3]
Electron 2.4.4 / 14 April 2023; 11 months ago (2023-04-14 )
[4]
UWP 2.4.4 / 13 April 2023; 11 months ago (2023-04-13 )
[5] Browsers 3.6.0 / 12 November 2022; 16 months ago (2022-11-12 )
[6]
Repository Written in
C++ (desktop),
Kotlin (Android),
Swift (iOS, macOS),
JavaScript (browser, Electron, UWP)
Operating system
Android ,
iOS ,
macOS ,
Windows ,
Linux ,
Windows 10 Mobile ,
Ubuntu Touch
[7]
Size
Desktop: 121 MB
Electron: 71.1 MB
Android: 80 MB
iOS: 48.3 MB
UWP: 12.1 MB
Available in 100 languages
[8]
License
GPLv3 Website
www .kiwix .org
Kiwix Android App
Kiwix is a
free and open-source offline
web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007.
[9] It was first launched to allow
offline access to
Wikipedia , but has since expanded to include other projects from the
Wikimedia Foundation ,
public domain texts from
Project Gutenberg , many of the
Stack Exchange sites, and many other resources. Available in more than 100 languages, Kiwix has been included in several high-profile projects, from smuggling operations in
North Korea
[10] to Google Impact Challenge's recipient
Bibliothèques Sans Frontières .
[11]
History
Founder Emmanuel Engelhart sees
Wikipedia as a
common good , saying "The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without
Internet access . This is why I have launched the Kiwix project."
[9]
After becoming a Wikipedia editor in 2004, Engelhart became interested in developing
offline versions of Wikipedia. A project to make a Wikipedia CD, initiated in 2003, was a trigger for the project.
[9]
In 2012, Kiwix received a grant from
Wikimedia France to build a kiwix-plug, which was deployed to
universities in eleven countries known as the
Afripedia Project .
[12]
[13] In February 2013 Kiwix won
SourceForge 's Project of the Month award
[14] and an
Open Source Award in 2015.
[15]
Description
The software is designed as an
offline reader for a web content. It can be used on computers without an
internet connection , computers with a slow or expensive connection, or to avoid
censorship . It can also be used while
travelling (e.g. on a
plane or
train ).
Users first download Kiwix, then download content for offline viewing with Kiwix.
Compression saves
disk space and
bandwidth . All of English-language Wikipedia, with pictures, fits on a large
USB stick or external media.
[a]
[14]
[16]
All content files are compressed in
ZIM format , which makes them smaller, but leaves them easy to index, search, and selectively decompress.
The ZIM files are then opened with Kiwix, which looks and behaves like a
web browser . Kiwix offers full
text search ,
tabbed navigation , and the option to export articles to
PDF and
HTML .
[8]
There is an
HTTP server version called kiwix-serve ; this allows a computer to host Kiwix content, and make it available to other computers on a network.
[17] The other computers see an ordinary website. Kiwix-hotspot is an
HTTP server version for
plug computers ,
[14] which is often used to provide a
Wi-Fi server .
[18]
Available content
Reading
Wikipedia through Kiwix on a boat in the
South Pacific
[19]
A list of content available on Kiwix is available for download, including language-specific sublists.
[20] Content can be loaded through Kiwix itself.
Since 2014, most Wikipedia versions are available for download in various different languages.
[16] The project was unable to produce up-to-date complete versions of English Wikipedia after October 2018 but started making releases again in July 2020.
[21]
Besides Wikipedia, content from the Wikimedia Foundation such as
Wikisource ,
Wikiquote ,
Wikivoyage ,
Wikibooks , and
Wikiversity are also available for offline viewing in various different languages.
[22]
In November 2014, a ZIM version of all
open texts forming part of
Project Gutenberg was made available.
[23]
[24]
Besides public domain content, works licensed under a
Creative Commons
license are available for download as well. For example, offline versions of the
Ubuntu
wiki containing user documentation for the Ubuntu operating system,
[25] ZIM editions of
TED conference talks
[26] and videos from
Crash Course are available in the Kiwix archive as ZIM file formats.
[27]
Historic Wikipedia articles selection releases
Between 2007 and 2011, three CD/DVD versions containing a selection of articles from the
English Wikipedia were released.
[28] They are now available as Kiwix ZIM files:
[29]
Deployments
Kiwix can be installed on a
desktop computer as a stand-alone program, installed on a
tablet or
smartphone , or can create its own
WLAN environment from a
Raspberry Pi .
As a software development project, Kiwix itself is not directly involved in deployment projects. However, third party organizations do use the software as a component of their own projects. Examples include:
Locations of 13 universities in 11 countries where Kiwix was deployed as part of the
Afripedia Project
Package managers and app stores
Medical Wikipedia app on a
smartphone
Kiwix is available in the native
package managers of most
Linux distributions. From 2014 to 2020, it was absent, due to
XULRunner , a program on which Kiwix depended, being
deprecated by
Mozilla and removed from the
package databases .
[49]
[50]
Kiwix is available on
Debian
[51] and Debian-based distributions, such as
Ubuntu
[52] and
Linux Mint ,[
citation needed ]
Fedora
[53] and other
RPM -based distributions, such as
openSUSE ,
[54] and on the
Sugar ,[
citation needed ]
Arch Linux ,
[55] and
NixOS
[56] distributions. A distribution-independent
Flatpak version is also available.
[57] It is also available on
Android . Kiwix JS UWP and Electron packages are available in the native Windows package manager
winget .
Kiwix is available in the
Microsoft Store ,
[5] on
Google Play ,
[58] and
Apple 's
iOS
App Store .
[3] It is also available as an installable HTML5 app (Kiwix JS) in the form of
browser extensions for
Firefox and Chromium (
Chrome ,
Edge ) and as a
Progressive Web Application (PWA),
[59] all of which work offline.
Electron packages of the HTML5 app are compiled for Windows and popular Linux distributions.
[60] Since 2015, a series of "customized apps" have also been released, of which
Medical Wikipedia and
PhET simulations are the two largest.
See also
GoldenDict supports the ZIM file format since 2013,
[61] including offline use (except on Android) and the ability to create full-text indices.
XOWA
Internet-in-a-Box
Notes and references
Notes
^ 102 GB with pictures, 52 GB without pictures, and 13 GB with only the introduction, as of 22 March 2024.
References
^
"kiwix-desktop: Releases" .
GitHub .
^
"kiwix-android: Releases" .
GitHub .
^
a
b
"Kiwix on the App Store" .
App Store . 29 May 2023.
^
"Kiwix JS Windows/Linux: Releases" .
GitHub .
^
a
b
"Kiwix JS" .
Windows Store .
Microsoft .
^
"Kiwix JS" .
GitHub .
^
"OpenStore" . OpenStore . Retrieved 2024-01-02 .
^
a
b
"Kiwix" .
SourceForge . Retrieved 22 March 2012 .
^
a
b
c
d Sutherland, Joe.
Emmanuel Engelhart, Inventor of Kiwix: the Offline Wikipedia Browser . In:
Wikimedia Blog . 12 September 2014. Accessed on 26 November 2014.
^
"The plot to free North Korea with smuggled episodes of 'Friends' " .
Wired . Retrieved 27 April 2016 .
^
"Les Lauréats du Google Impact Challenge" . Retrieved 27 April 2016 .
^
Citazine article on Afripedia (in French)
^ Traoré, Kardiatou (13 August 2012).
"Afripédia : un projet de promotion de Wikipédia en Afrique" . www.afrik.com . Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
"Kiwix Aims to spread Wikipedia's Reach" . dice.com. 2013-02-04. Retrieved 2013-07-10 .
^
"OSS Awards küren Schweizer Open-Source-Projekte" . Netzwoche. 29 October 2015. Retrieved 8 December 2015 .
^
a
b
"Content in all languages - Kiwix" . wiki.kiwix.org . Retrieved 8 August 2016 .
^
Kiwix-serve
^
"Kiwix-plug - Kiwix" . wiki.kiwix.org . Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
a
b
"Sailing the South Pacific with a copy of Wikipedia on board: The Goodall Family" .
Wikimedia Blog . 15 November 2014. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Content in all languages - Kiwix" . wiki.kiwix.org . Retrieved 2017-06-09 .
^ Truong, Kevin (2020-07-10).
"You Can Download the Entirety of English Wikipedia to Browse Offline" . Vice . Retrieved 2023-07-27 .
^
Zim archive for Kiwix
^ Engelhart, Emmanuel.
50.000 public domain books available to everybody, everywhere, offline .
Wikisource -l-Mailinglist,
Wikimedia Foundation . 19 November 2014. Accessed on 26 November 2014.
^
"Words and what not: #Wikimedia & Project #Gutenberg - the sum of all knowledge" . ultimategerardm.blogspot.ch . 20 November 2014. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
Ubuntuusers Hilfsmittel
^
Kiwix archive for TED
^
Kiwix archive for additional content
^
"wikipediaondvd.com" . 2007-04-27. Archived from
the original on 27 April 2007. Retrieved 2022-06-22 .
^
"Index of /archive/zim/wikipedia" . download.kiwix.org . Retrieved 2022-06-22 .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.5 at download.kiwix.org" .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.5 at Internet Archive" .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.7 at download.kiwix.org" .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.7 at Internet Archive" .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.8 at download.kiwix.org" .
^
"Wikipedia Version 0.8 at Internet Archive" .
^
"Main Page - Kiwix" . wiki.kiwix.org . Retrieved 16 February 2022 .
^
"Afripedia project increasing off-line access to Wikipedia in Africa" .
Wikimedia Blog . 24 January 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Off-line solutions for reaching students with limited or no internet access" . UNESCO International Bureau of Education. 7 May 2020.
Archived from the original on 28 June 2021. Retrieved 16 February 2022 .
^
"Raspberry Pi in Masekelo: Bringing Wikipedia to a school without electricity" .
Wikimedia Blog . 17 March 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Children in Mali can now read Wikipedia offline, thanks to MALebooks e-readers" .
Wikimedia Blog . 14 May 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"West African schools will test Kiwix, the offline Wikipedia reader" . Wikimedia Outreach Education Newsletter .
Wikimedia Foundation . 31 August 2016. Retrieved 11 June 2017 .
^
"Kiwix is mentioned on the thank-you page" . Zedaga (in French). Archived from
the original on 7 August 2017. Retrieved 11 June 2017 .
^
Fondation Orange: le programme "écoles numériques"
Archived 5 April 2015 at the
Wayback Machine .
^
"Hans Oleander: Using offline Wikipedia to guide tours at the bottom of the Earth" .
Wikimedia Blog . 10 October 2014. Retrieved 11 June 2017 .
^
"Kiwix'le Wikipedia'ya ulaşmak hala mümkün" . gazetekarinca.com (in Turkish). 5 May 2017. Archived from
the original on 6 May 2017. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Navigatrix.net - A Voyager's Companion" . navigatrix.net . Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Navigatrix – the first Linux distribution for cruisers" . Your Cruising Editor . 30 July 2010. Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^ Amarilli, Antoine.
"A local copy of Wikipedia with Kiwix - a3nm's blog" . a3nm.net . Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Debian" . wiki.kiwix.org . Retrieved 6 January 2020 .
^
"Debian Package Tracker: kiwix offline Wikipedia reader" . Debian Foundation. Retrieved 8 August 2022 . [
permanent dead link ]
^
"Debian -- Details of package kiwix in bookworm" . packages.debian.org . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
"Ubuntu – Details of package kiwix in kinetic" . packages.ubuntu.com . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
"kiwix-desktop - Fedora Packages" . packages.fedoraproject.org . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
"openSUSE Software" . software.opensuse.org . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
"Arch Linux - kiwix-desktop 2.3.1-3 (x86_64)" . archlinux.org . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
Kiwix Nixpkg , Nix/Nixpkgs/NixOS, 2023-06-24, retrieved 2023-06-24
^
"Kiwix" . Flathub . Retrieved 2023-06-24 .
^
"Kiwix, Wikipedia offline - Android Apps on Google Play" .
Google Play . Retrieved 8 March 2016 .
^
"Kiwix JS PWA" . Retrieved 15 May 2021 .
^
"Releases · kiwix/kiwix-js-windows" . GitHub . Retrieved 2022-05-24 .
^
"Add Support Kiwix Encyclopedia of Wikipedia ".zim" file type · Issue #267 · goldendict/goldendict" . GitHub . Retrieved 2021-11-30 .
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
Kiwix .