Can someone take a site dump, and somehow read it offline? Yes!
Steps to getting offline access to Appropedia
Note! It's not clear if this works any more. Please let us know on the talk page if you try it. Also check #Alternatives, below.
This approach uses the Zipedia Add-On for Firefox. Concerns:
- Zipedia is no longer found in Firefox's addon database. What is the reason?
- It is claimed to work with Firefox 1.5-3.0. It's not clear if it works with later versions.
Assumptions
- You are on a windows machine - the general steps are identical for Linux (zipedia works just fine on Linux) but you will need different software to create the .bz2 file
Steps
- Download and Install the latest version of Firefox.
- Add the Zipedia Add-On to Firefox.
- Download the Appropedia current dump (here).
- Download and install 7zip
- uncompress .gz file
- Right click on file
- Choose "7zip"
- Choose "Extract here"
- compress .xml file to .bz2
- Right Click on "currentdump.xml"
- Choose "7zip"
- Choose "add to archive"
- Change Archive Format to "BZip2"
- Click "OK"
- Import to Zipedia
- Reload Firefox if you haven't already
- Click "Tools"
- Click "Add-ons"
- Select Zipedia
- Click "Options"
- Click "Generate Zipedia"
- Select "Next"
- The input path should be your newly created .bz2 file
- The output path should be an empty folder such as "appropeda" in your "my documents" folder
- type "wikipedia://wiki/Appropedia:CategoryTree" into your address bar
If you have any questions, hit up my talk page David.reber 04:51, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Alternatives
- 10 Ways to Download Wikipedia for Offline Browsing (appears to be from mid-2010)
- WikiBrowse is an OLPC project for browsing a slice of Wikipedia offline. It has not been tried yet with Appropedia.
- Kiwix, available since 2010, is another offline reader for Wikipedia or any other Web site whose content someone has exported to a ZIM file. The Collection extension appears to make it possible to export Appropedia (in whole or a subset) to a ZIM file.
Further Reading
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikislice might help.
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse_English.
- https://www.lee.org/blog/2008/08/17/how-to-create-an-html-dump-of-mediawiki/
- Seth from OLPC says (via Twitter): "SJ and CJB have spent quite a lot of time compressing large sections of #wikipedia into a stand-alone static library... come to think of it cscott has done a lot of work in static caching of our wiki in interesting ways, he would be useful too."
- http://www.thewikireader.com/update This $99 device can host several off-line "pedias" but no pictures. How useful would Appropedia would be without pictures? Would it be part of what WikiReader owners would want?