All of Wikipedia can be installed to your desktop in just 30 hours

Xowa is an open source application that downloads and displays an offline copy of English Wikipedia on a desktop. It keeps HTML formatting intact, can add other wikis such as Wiktionary or Wikquote, and lets the user move between them while offline.

Reading notes

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• Xowa automates the process of hosting Wikipedia offline on a desktop.
• The full English Wikipedia copy includes 4.4 million articles with HTML formatting intact.
• It can also set up other wikis, including Wiktionary and Wikquote, and let the user navigate between them offline.
• The app was updated with support for the entire English-language version of Wikipedia.
• Setting up the text version requires 80GB of disk space and about five hours of processing time.
• Adding images raises the requirements to 100GB of disk space and 30 hours of processing time.
• After setup, the wiki files shrink to 25GB after cleanup.
• Xowa is built mainly from XUL Runner, Java, and SWT.
• A smaller setup with Simple Wikipedia takes about five minutes for the text version and 30 minutes with images.
• Xowa runs on Windows, Linux, or OS X and can be updated from Wikimedia database backups.