Thanks to kiwix I am now able to browse and search wikipedia articles offline. Kiwix allows browsing of compressed `zim’ files, zim files are downloadable for wikipedia in various languages.
In most of the languages versions available these zim files contain all of the pages. For english wikipedia the file contains ~47,300+ articles of the 0.8 release of wikipedia (wikipedia_en_wp1_0.8_45000+_12_2010.zim) from December 2010. This was a test release by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, who selected articles based on quality and importance. The file is 3.8Gb and contains text and some images, usually the thumbnails you would see on usual wikipedia files.
It seems like kiwix uses code from the chrome web brower, so maybe there is also a project to browse these zim files from inside firefox.
Wikipedia is available under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, and kiwix is available under version 3 of the GNU General Public License GPLv3 with versions available for slaveware OS’s OSX and Windows, as well as free linux distributions.
See animation (screencast) of kiwix in operation.
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Installation details
I downloaded and compiled kiwix-0.9 on debian current stable release (squeeze), using ./configure, make, make install. Package installations is available for Ubuntu, Gentoo and Archlinux.
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